Community Building

User generated content seems to be the big trend surrounding web 2.0. The quality of that user generated content is a concern for webmasters all around.

The goal of building a community is a difficult one. I've watched as many communities started out with lofty goals and ended up sputtering quickly - communities that should have done well. Like any business, success has a great deal to do with two things - management and marketing.

From a user generated content perspective, the primary area that most webmasters concern themselves with is a message board, although lately there has been a trend towards user generated article pages as well. From a message board standpoint, there simply is no way to get around the fact that each and every post needs to be read and evaluated. While you don't want to offend your users by over-moderating them, you do need to keep an eye out for spammers and gain control of things if the community has a problem - with either the site management or with each other. You also want to make sure that conversation starters get addressed - especially in the early stages of forum development. End users just won't keep coming back for more if their questions or comments are left without a reply.

There is also the question of a dead message board - which is the most common cause for message boards sputtering out. Ico-Content, which I mentioned a few days ago certainly is one solution to keep things going, but as a long term strategy it needs daily management. You need visitors to make a messageboard work, and lots of them. Aside from visitors, there is the requirement of discussion topics, and continuation of existing discussions. These need to be monitored heavily during first phase release, and often the admin is relegated to posting under various usernames to keep things running smoothly.

Messageboards are often considered high cost low return investments - users turn ad blind and suck up server side resources like there is no tomorrow. The flip side of that statement is that messageboard users frequently return for more and they can be pushed out to other more profitable web site areas if you do your homework.

From an article generation standpoint, I'm not too sure about the effectiveness of various strategies for getting users to generate quality articles. I think the best strategy aside from forums/messageboards is to encourage social bookmarking and accepting brief summaries or articles of less than 250 words. It won't do much from an SEO standpoint, but it will do wonders towards keeping your content fresh and giving visitors a reason to return to your website.

Ideally, a strong startup community will have several defining characteristics:

• Frequent Content Updates
• Fairly Frequent Website updates - to show the users that the admins are working hard and listening to feedback
• Feature Length Articles published with regularity - the 250 word snippets are great, but you can see those anywhere
• The ability for the community to interact with eachother
• Cookies for interaction - something to encourage community interaction, whether it is a prize or some arbitrary form of recognition
• Links to authoritative external sites - you can't be the encyclopedia britannica and you need to recognize that. There should always be a link to more information
• A combination of authoritative information, useful utilities, humor, and off topic, but community relevant information
• Standard and expected web site functionality - privacy policy, contact information, feedback mechanism, etc.
• High performance design - pretty, but functional
• Consistent, reliable, and fast server side response

This is by no means a be all end all list of things that need to be addressed, but it certainly is a good starting point.