Digithoughts

The 4 C's of Online Community Building

July 10, 2009 by Dexter Bustarde I have a theory when it comes to online communities. It's based on several words that begin with the letter C. I get to work with clients on how to improve "engagement" with the site, and when I do, I usually look to see how they can improve on each of the following areas. CONTEXT The start and end point is Context. I like to think of Context as, very basically, what your website is about. What does your community or prospective do? What do they like to talk about? Very often this is defined by whatever is on the site to begin with. If you have a site about tech gadgets, then the context that people have is that people on your site will be talking about tech gadgets. If you have a site about cheese, then it's not far fetched to think that people will be cheese interested. Action Item: Make sure the context for your online community is clearly defined. This should be no problem, but if you have a site about tech gadgets and your community appears to be more interested in cheese, you might want to take a look at your presentation style. Also, consider that there should be something that a community would want to talk about and be able to communicate effectively. Basically, stay current with your topics. COMMENT The comment is the fundamental unit of social media communities. It is the seed planted in the fertile soil of your online community effort. There are obviously other Web 2.0 types of things that people can do with our web sites, but a comment is the starting point for bigger and better. Ask any blogger and they'll be able to tell you that the first time they received a comment on their site was a red letter day. What we want to do is nurture and help these comments grow into beautiful things like flowers, or fruit bearing trees. Action Item: Make it easy for users to comment. Many sites offer a nice big button for people to comment, but require fields upon fields of registration forms before the comment can be made. Make it easier than that. Tie it into things they're already familiar with. There are plenty of ways integrate your site with existing platforms such as Google, Twitter and Facebook. This can be a quick way of getting visitors into your community. One quick and easy test is to count the number of fields that need to be entered before an unregistered visitor is able to comment on your site. If the number of fields is in the double digits, or the number of clicks is beyond 3 or 4, it's almost guaranteed that you're scaring people away from participating. CONVERSATION The next step for a community is the conversation. Comments that live in a vaccuum die a sad and lonely death. The visitor who gave birth to that comment may plant the seed of another comment, but if it goes on without sustenance that visitor (a potential community member) may just take their intelligent feedback, thought provoking questions, positive marketing messages, or (gasp) negativity somewhere else. While this may not be particularly upsetting (especially in terms of negative comments), taking the time to simply respond to comments made by the community does two things:

1. It gives a "behave by example" effect for other members of the community that conversation is encouraged.
2. It actually starts the conversation.

Conversations are not just multiple comments, but rather multiple comments from multiple people that are being directed at one another. Beyond that, the beauty of an online conversation is that it's available for others to participate in and learn from, even if those people weren't a part of the original discussion. In other words, conversations need to be easy to have and need to be easy to read to give as many people as possible the chance to participate. This might seem obvious, but think about how many commenting tools actually work. On certain platforms, you still see comment conversations that are made up of hacked "responses" in the form of comments that start with @username (something that has been embraced by Twitter users getting around a limitation). While conversations like this can be made to work in one-to-one, the real benefit of online community is lost. Essentially, the rest of the community wants to listen into this conversation, but are only given brief snippets here and there. This not only makes it hard during the conversation, but readability later on is also lost. Many sites are moving towards nested comment systems (Disqus is a great example) and live commenting (SB Nation, the sports blog network I write for does this very well). This are terrific ways of turning conversation into content. Action Item: Think of ways to facilitate actual conversations on site and ways to make those conversations accessible at a later date. Look at nested comment systems, live comment systems and comment recommendation systems as ways to facilitate conversation and reward people for participating. CONTENT Once comments are turned into conversations, conversations become content. This is the element that's worth mentioning and a major reason why analysts talk about Social Media being great for SEO. Basically, once you've written a blog post or an article or some other piece worth seeing on your site, if a conversation happens, your 300 word blog post suddenly becomes a petri dish for growing keywords, relevant content and links to more content, all of which make for great SEO. Action Item: Reference good conversations that are happening on your site. Make sure that the conversations are actively working towards your SEO by properly tagging them and formatting them so that search engines think, Hey, here's some more content! This is terrific! Once those 4 C's are in place and are functioning, before long, you'll have yourself the makings of your very own Community! And then, it will be onto the magical 6th C: Conversion, which we'll tackle in a future post.