“I don’t know if I should build an online community”.
I hear this very often when I’m working with clients that are launching a community – or building the foundation of what might become a community – to be more accurate.
A couple of over arching considerations:
- What are the marketing goals and how will building a community support them?
- Can your organization sustain an ongoing investment of time and money to build a community?
Here are some more specific questions*:
- Are people genuinely interested in your organization?
- Do you have buy in from the top to go down this road?
- Can you develop content and sustain conversations?
- How will you keep people engaged?
- How will you add value to people’s lives?
- Will you mine the activity for actionable data?
- Who will manage the community?
- How will you monetize your community?
- How will you measure the activity and the results?
*this is a partial list of questions.
There aren’t any plug and play answers. There are lots of thriving communities in various spaces. And there’s also a lot of under performing and unnecessary communities (if you can even call them that), and lastly there’s a lot of dead spaces that were trying to be communities.
