Today I’ll talk about another way encourage a community to develop on your web site; give your community an “identity” and a “mission”.

A community identity helps your members feel like they’re part of an exclusive club.  A mission gives the group a purpose and helps members feel like they’re part of a greater cause.  Both are excellent ways to build and retain membership.

For example, the Ante Up poker blog identifies its readers and podcast listeners as the “Ante Up Nation.”  Members are encouraged to learn less popular varieties of poker (in addition to the over-popular Texas Hold’em) and to help spread the word.  Community members frequently call in to their podcast or post on their forums to describe their experience of playing these games online or at a local casino and finding other members of the “nation” in the wild.

Strong communities give members a satisfying sense of reward for their membership and participation.  Some people will feel rewarded by contributing to the community, and others will simply be happy to have an association with the group.

As an added bonus, you can monetize your community by selling items through online stores like CafePress (aff) and Zazzle (aff) with your community’s name, slogan, mission statement, etc.

Got a prosperous web community with an identity and a mission?  Leave us comments to showcase it!

Microsoft’s www.asp.net website is all about community.  Between this site, Channel9, and xBox Live, Microsoft is getting pretty good at building communities online.  The ASP.net website recently launched a community recognition program, awarding various levels of points for different types of website participation.  For example, forum posts get you 5 points each.  This is a great way to encourage your users to participate in, not just read you site or blog. 

The front page of www.asp.net also features a cool marquee showing recent community activity, top contributors, etc.  Imagine your surprise when you visit the site and see your name in flashing lights on the front page!  Now that’s a way to recognize your users!  Many users will be motivated by this alone.  Of course, some will want more recognition, gifts, money, and fame.  If they’re your MVPs, find a way to get it for ‘em.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Community Server has features to enable a points-based recognition system.  I’m not intimately familiar with all the community platforms out there (yet), so if you know of another system that helps you with points and rewards, please let me know in the comments.

Strong communities are built on strong relationships.  At first, these relationships are between you and your members.  Your role in the early stages of community building is to facilitate these relationships between your site and your users.  Over time, your members will start to form relationships with each other and your role will shift to facilitating relationships between users.  Here are some tips for building strong bonds in the early phases of your site’s life.

In a relationship, both sides want something - A general rule of thumb for any relationship is that both sides must get value from the relationship or it will break down and/or fall apart.  For example, in a manager/employee relationship, the manager gets value out of having work done and the employee gets a paycheck (and hopefuly some job satisfaction, but that’s for another blog).  Take either away, and the relationship gets into trouble.  In a personal relationship, both people might want respect, validation of their thoughts or emotions, or just the comfort of knowing they have someone they can count on to help them out.

When building relationships between the site and the user, the site admin gets value from having readers participate in the community.  This could come in the form of blog comments, forum posts, clicking on ads, buying products from the site’s affiliates, or even users submitting content or helping manage forums for free.  In turn (in my experience), the online community member generally wants:

1. a friendly site where they can freely express their opinions
2. the opportunity to participate in interesting discussions
3. to feel important by helping other users
4. fresh content on a regular basis

In your particulat community, this list might vary, but the general idea holds.  Understanding exactly what your users want and then delivering it to them is key to the early phases of communiteering.  Consider polling your users to find out which topics interest them most, which site features they want to see, etc.  Once you have a good idea of what your users are looking for, focus intensely on delivering those things.  Then step back and see how well your changes are received, get feedback from your users, and tweak if necessary.

Additionally, some users might also want a little ego boost when they do something great on your site.  For example, they might get a big kick out of a simple thank-you in a blog post for submitting ideas or content or for helping gather new readers for your blog.  Other users might not appreciate public recognition, but in general, I’ve found that the more prolific online community members love recognition.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, thanking users with material gifts can be especially encouraging.

Trust - Establishing trust with your members is not as hard as you might think.  There are several ways you can accomplish this.  Perhaps most important, your members will want to know you’re not going to pass their information or e-mail addresses on to third parties.  Posting a privacy policy on your site and giving users the ability to opt in (not out!) of any e-mail based communication from your site is a good idea.  Next most important is to do what you say - if your users opt out of e-mail communications, don’t send them mail under any circumstances!  Let them dictate to you whether or not they want to be contacted, and if so, how.  In online communities, eyeballs are your commodity, and keeping them happy is critical.  Keeping your forums moderated is another good way to build trust.  If a top user sees that you have their back when they’re getting flamed by disruptive users, they’ll quickly learn to trust in your judgement and will see that they’re able to freely post their thoughts.  This is a touchy topic, however, so I’ll discuss forum moderation in depth in future posts.

Trust being a two-way road, you also want to build trust in your users.  Usually, this builds up over time as your MVPs submit interesting comment, start interesting threads in the forums, call out spam or offensive posts in your forums, etc.  As you build trust in your users, approach them to see if they would like to help by writing articles or being official forum moderators.  Generally, you want to observe users for an extended period of time to be sure they’re personally invested in your community before you hand out opportunities like this.

Communication - This is closely related to building trust, especially in the early phases of communiteering.  Answering user questions submitted through forums, blog comments, or e-mail is very important.  Even if your users ae just saying hi, showing them you’re listening helps encourage them to come back and continue participating.  If they’re aksing questions, then quick-turnaround is critical.  Even if you don’t know the answer, let them know you heard the question and set their expectations on when they could expect an answer from you or give them ideas for how to find the answer by other means. 

That’s it for now.  In the upcoming Part II, we’ll discuss how to facilitate building trust between users in the later phases of communiteering.  Of course, if you have any additional ideas for how to build trust with your users, please share them in our forums or in comments on this post.  Thanks for reading!

Here’s an interesting free trend report from a marketing company called Connecting the Dots about Web 2.0 and what it’s all about.  If you’re considering starting a new web community, this report will give you some valuable insight.  It’s well written with plenty of links and examples to help explain each point.  The report is available in “web” format with links or as a downloadable PDF document.

Do you remember the movie Field of Dreams?  “If you build it, they will come“.  Well, the Communiteer has a slightly different spin on that advice:

If they build it, they will come back.

It’s a simple rule.  If your users contribute customized content to your website, they’ll feel a sense of responsibility and pride in their creation and they’ll want to come back.  Even if they have an introverted personality, being online gives them a chance to express themselves with an entirely different persona.  The mild mannered geek by day might be the MVP (most valuable poster) who keeps your forums alive and interesting for all your other readers! 

People tend to be both gregarious and competitive by nature.  The gregarious side wants to find a group of people who share their same interests and opinions.  The competitive side wants to be the leader of the pack; a micro-star in your online universe.  As the administrator of an online community, you want to find as many opportunities as possible for your users to define their online persona and find their audience.

Successful online communities may include discussion forums, personal blogs, image galleries, polls, avatar pictures (small custom images to represent users), wiki’s, etc.  Your users will constantly amaze you with their creativity while carving out an online persona for themselves at the same time.  Of course, there’s a side benefit for you, the site administrator; the more free content your users contribute, the less you have to come up with!

Stay tuned to this blog as we walk you through starting your own online community, adding features, advertising your site to attract new users, retaining your users, and more!