It should give you a great overview about both the strategy and the process of creating an online community from scratch. The Online Community Basics. Primer About Successful Online Communities. The 11 Fundamental Laws of Online Communities. The Four Tenets Of Professional Community Managers. Building An Online Community: How You Start With 0 Members. How Do You Build An Online Community? Contrary Truths About Online Communities. Don’t Start A Community For Any Of These Reasons. Basics Community Building Principles. Content. MORE >>

If your community concept is wrong, you will struggle at every stage of the community development process and ultimately fail.    The concept is what the community will be. It's tempting to breeze past this step with casual assertions; "The community will be for our customers to talk about our products " Which is fine, unless your customers don't want to talk about your products.     What will the community be about? Your community doesn't have to be about your organization. The biggest community of its kind? MORE >>

You can remind members to participate, highlight interesting activities, help foster a greater sense of community through a newsletter, and engage in tactics to increase visits to the community.    Most community managers do a terrible job at this. At best you can measure this number for sign of community health and for understanding conversion rates. Just make sure when they visit there are interesting events and discussions they can see taking place in your community.    2) The lurkers. They are not lurkers. MORE >>

People join a community for a reason. e.g.  'If members are interested in roasting their own coffee, let's make the community about coffee roasting. ' This leads to content-driven strategies.    These don't work well for communities. This However, it puts people in a passive (lurker) mindset. At the moment, most communities are designed for lurkers.    Build the community concept around that spot.   Branded Online CommunitiesThat reason is a benefit. MORE >>

This post is the second in a two-part series where guest blogger  Garry Polmateer , former association executive currently working at  NimbleUser helping organizations with Salesforce, looks at two online brands through the lens of the concepts in our book,  Open Community. We loved Garry’s idea for this two-parter and we welcome any guest post ideas from any of our readers who are interested in digging into Open Community from whatever angle you choose. To revisit the last article, A Tale of Two Communities Part 1 – Volkswagen , I looked at the Volkswagen community.  MORE >>