While I've only been involved in web development and SEO for three years, I've been participating in online communities since 2001. Over the last six years, it's been my privilege to help build and moderate a few online communities. I've learned a lot about the way people think and behave online and picked up a few helpful bits of information--and fortunately, I like sharing.
Picking a PlatformWhich community platform you choose depends on the overall goals for the community. Also, picking a platform isn't strictly about a software decision--it's also a publishing format decision. Here at SEOmoz, they've chosen to build a community around a group blog publishing format, rather than a moderated forum publishing format. There are a variety of reasons for choosing a particular publishing format. A group blog format suggests "articles" and value-added content moreso than a forum, and in a professional development community, that is an appropriate format. However, obviously examples like highrankings.com and other search engine forums demonstrate that a moderated forum format can work as well. It all depends on the kind of community you want to attract and build.
From a software perspective, there are certainly more options available now than there were a few years ago when I first started getting involved in online community building. There are hosted solutions, such as Ning and CollectiveX, that are designed to build communities with a fairly rich feature set. Wordpress and other blogging solutions now come installed with different user permission levels, making using them for a more community-oriented site possible and practical.
There are still, of course, the old standby of forum software, PHPBB. Formerly known as the software of choice for fanboy forums, and plagued with frequent script-kiddy attacks that exploited the holes in its security, PHPBB is currently a much more stable and secure application than it once was, but administrators still need to make sure they frequently update their security patches. There are also newer entries in the forum software arena that offer better design options than PHPBB, such as Lussumo's Vanilla and Simple Machine's forum software.
Creating Personality
Successful online communities are like offline neighborhoods--they have a distinctive personality and flavor. One of the challenges of building an online community from scratch is attracting a core of members who will build the kind of community that you envisioned. Many times, new online communities form similarly to the offline world--from affinity groups formed within larger, older communities. An example would be a new company founded by a small group of work buddies at a larger company, or small churches, clubs and other organizations springing from larger ones. These new communities often retain some of the personality of the original group, but grow in a new and different direction.
Which brings us to another topic: allowing the community to grow and develop organically. Over-moderation can kill an otherwise successful community site. Don't be afraid to seed topics and prune members and topics judiciously, but be aware that you'll need to give up a certain measure of control and allow the community to take its own shape to an extent, even if that shape isn't exactly what you first had in mind. Guiding the development of the community personality should be like Mr. Miyagi and his bonsai trees: part conscious design, and part letting the natural shape express itself.
Protecting the Community
Unfortunately, we don't live in a world full of rainbows, unicorns and glitter. Hic sunt dracones, online as offline--in fact moreso since the appearance of anonymity on the internet often brings out the worst in people (see: Kathy Sierra). If you're going to be in the business of building and managing online communities, you have a responsibility to be the sheriff, protecting your community from predators. People need to feel safe and comfortable for your community to grow well.
This is one of the reasons that it's important to delegate the responsibility for moderating and administering the community. When you choose a strong team of trusted moderators and editors, the odds of a situation getting out of hand decrease dramatically. Another thing that helps is being clear and explicit about the rules for participation, and enforcing those rules consistently across the board. Give a good deal of thought about the permissions that you will give to new members, and the conditions that need to be met to earn increased permissions.
If you wanted to go above and beyond in preparing to protect your community (and you should), you might read The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout or The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, which both offer good, easily accessible information on identifying predatory personalities that can easily be translated to the online environment.
The biggest tip I can give in this regard is to listen to your gut. I once moderated two topically-related communities, one of which was women-only. A big part of what made that community successful was the sense of freedom that came from an all-female forum. I had a weird vibe from one member of the mixed-gender forum, and suddenly his "fiancee" started posting on the women-only board. The guy was a fairly longstanding and well-liked member of the other forum, but there was something "off" about the posts from his fiancee in the women's community. Sure enough, when I checked the IP addresses, an unmistakable pattern immerged: "John" was definitely posting as "Jane." As unpleasant as it was when I had to "bust" a popular member and inform the women that a man had been posting as his significant other, it could have been much worse had I not listened to my gut.
As social media becomes a more and more important part of the online marketing mix, learning how to build and grow thriving online communities will continue to be a valuable skill. It's a complicated skillset that requires both a little technical savvy and a LOT of people-smarts. But for the right people, it's an extremely rewarding pursuit, whether done in personal, business, or mixed-use applications.
Great write up, I often think about communities and it was nice to read you perspective, I am glad you wrote it. I remember a post that I used to refer to alot about building community. I am going to refer to it again...
How to build a User Community
Very interesting post. I am fascinated by online communities and how they grow and develop into their own "beings" with the power to turn on the very people who created the community.
The most interesting example of this that I've seen is the late Fametracker forums, which used to be the place to go to snark on pop culture. Basically, these were forums where everything and anything could be discussed - books, movies, music, and of course, celebrities.
Everytime I posted there, I marveled at the civility of the contributors. The rules were strict, and everyone knew them - you weren't even allowed to start a sentence with "um", because it was considered rude. For all the diversity of opinions, you were never afraid to state your mind about the different topics because it was so well-moderated.
Then, it was announced that the Fametracker forums were being discontinued. The announcement was made a few days before they were actually shut down, but the moderators left early. In the last few days before the forums closed forever, chaos reigned. People were finally free to say anything they wanted, and it was shocking.
I was astonished at the amount of vitriol leveled at the forum's creators and moderators. It turns out that underneath the seeming civility and decorum was hatred, resentment, and bitterness about a whole lot of things, but especially about the heavy-handed moderators who had no problems banning even helpful, considerate members of the community if they so much as seemed to violate any of the guidelines for posting.
I think that the reason for this turnabout was because no one was ever allowed to criticize Fametracker on their forums. The rule was, "You can't discuss the forums on the forums." That meant that people had to keep all of their hurt feelings inside, all the time. I think this kind of outcome is avoidable. For instance, here at SEOmoz, it's unlikely that there would ever be a backlash of that magnitude, because they allow (and even welcome) constructive criticism.
There's a fine line between allowing people to make comments about the community and not allowing them to trash it. If you can walk that line, you can have a community that's civil without being suffocating.
The whole Fametracker experience was eye-opening, to say the least, and I never participate in any onlline community now without sometimes wondering what's really going on behind-the-scenes. All is not always what it appears to be.
Interesting post and thanks for taking the time to write. I will be attending the Web Innovation Summit in Las Vegas next week, and a large portion of this conference is geared around communities and related strategies. I will be sure to post an article or two from there (actual number probably based on how quickly I blow through my per diem at the blackjack table) based on the information that I pick up. I am looking forward to seeing how the online community trend plays out in the coming months and years, and how that will impact each of us. Obviously, losing power of content to users can make optimization efforts difficult, but at the same time can help expand the current boundaries of the site to include new things you may have never even thought of.
Thanks for the great post. This directly applies to a project I am currently working on in Drupal. I am curious to know why Drupal was not mentioned in your article. I would be interested to hear any thoughts you have on the Drupal platform and what you have heard from your network about the strengths and weaknesses of Drupal. So far we find Drupal to be quite flexible and it offers so many great community features "out of the box."
Great post, thanks for sharing it. I'm interested in learning more aobut optimizing community sites as well. I run a social network on the Ning.com platform called Brooklyn Art Project https://www.brooklynartproject.com and we're using traditional SEO strategies to boost rankings.
We have a blog associated with the community where we feature member work which in turn boosts traffic, now we're looking at other ways of partering with our members and all of their individual blogs to boost things further.
Ning.com by the way has been awesome to work with. Their service blows me away everytime we need them and the customization goes pretty deep. I'm interested in hearing about new SEO strategies for community sites that are getting traction, these days it's a lof of experimenting. :)
-- Anthony
Thanks for the feedback! I've heard consistently good things about Ning, which is why I linked to them from my article.
In addition to SEOmoz, I've started reading and participating on Adgabber, which is also run on Ning. So far I've been very impressed.
Just wondering if anyone has used Sparta before? www.spartasocialnetworks.com This articles in time for my research into the use of a social network platform, so thanks KatFrench.
I am trying to find a commercial but scalable solution to start a social community, with users maxing at 30/40000. I do feel that a business can go totally wrong when using UGC - and as a result research needs to be VERY strong.
Buts comments and individual experiences are just as important.
Loved the article. I'm trying to develop my vBulletin site www.talkaboutissues.org
I think I have a great URL but I just need the community to grow faster.
Thanks so much for all the well thought out and well expressed feedback!
I apologize for leaving out Drupal--actually, the CMS we offer to clients is built on the Drupal framework, and as many have mentioned, it does come out of the box with a lot of community functionality. Several large community sites have been built on the platform (TeamSugar comes to mind.)
Agree completely with the comments from Michael Martinez and others about the dangers of poor moderation in both directions.
Another thing that springs to mind in relation to how communities form their personality is the old adage "like attracts like." Before I got into the web, I worked for a while in staffing and recruiting, and my supervisor would always say that if you found a good candidate, get them to give you contact information for everyone they know. People hang out with those whose values and interests they share, offline and online.
Great topic. It fascinates me how the different communities develop different personalities. I find myself reading the comments here more often than any other blog because so many of the comments are insightful and almost all are very positive, even in criticism. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but as much as I like Shoemoney's posts, I almost never read the comments because they are, well, of a different character that I don't find appealing.
Good article! As an experienced community administrator I'd also say that controlling spam is really important. Depending on what your topic is and what type of community you're running you could get a lot of it. Most of it is obvious but some people will do sneaky things to try to get their link in there. Like pretend that they're recommending a product that they use, or posting scraped content with linkbacks to their site, things like that. It's important to keep a balance between letting your members to promote themselves if they want to and keeping out the people who are just there to spam.
I like your bonsai tree comparison :) That fits with the spamming problem too.
My partner and I are working on moving our forum into Drupal from vBulletin (to go with our content area). It's another option for more extensive sites. The forums are nice because the base feature set is very clean and simple but you can add-on and customize a lot from there.
Very good article. I'm a moderator on a vbulletin community with around 10,000 members. We started out as a private 'clubhouse' for people with similar interests. We gradually began letting in others, until the traffic was just too much. We had to shut everything down for several weeks while we upgraded our server hosting, software, and moderation procedures. It's now a very successful online community with a very strict set of rules. When a member breaks those rules, they get ONE warning (depending on severity of their offense, of course), and after that they are banned. It's been hard on all of the moderators to see productive, well-liked members get banned for something that really wasn't a huge deal, but its what makes the community able to function with so many members, and limited moderation. I'm always interested in hearing other people's experiences in the same space. Thanks for writing!