Practical tips to manage to content-rich community
Aug 17th, 2007 by Hans De Keulenaer
(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
Loading ...While community websites are the holy grail in b2b marketing, they are hopefully less elusive. Hereby a few tips that work to animate a community:
- Have a site-wide contact form - this can serve as idea box, feedback procedure, complaint form and much more. But the internet is a wicked place sometimes, and the contact form may collect a lot of wild ideas with only a few gems. Therefore, make sure to clarify your policy on how you reply to requests. It may be worth to have a sandpit area on your site to park those ideas.
- Give users a personal page to present themselves - you’re likely to learn a thing or two about your industry and your users. Offer the members list to registered users.
- Be vigilant to remove spam registrations.
- Integrate user questions, forum and faq-lists. If you do take the effort to answer a question, post the reply on the forum for the benefit of other users. Post questions you find difficult to answer on your forum, or other peer-to-peer communities, and create a summary article on the answers.
- Use top 10 lists, of the most visited pages, the most downloaded files, the most active forums, … Users appreciate the collective wisdom of the crowd.
- Build reference lists of quality resources in your industry, for example a list of top blogs, list of universities & institutes, glossaries, …
- Animate the community with intelligent but short polls, mini-surveys, quizzes, …
- Set-up interviews with users, and publish as articles, podcasts, …
- Offer users a personal blog, but agree a clear blogging contract with them on the dos and donts
