Modern Insider – Online Marketing Blog

So you’ve decided to take the plunge and are ready to build your own branded forum community and foster a deeper degree of communication with your customers and prospects on your own website.

Launching a branded forum opens up a lot of doors but also requires a lot of decisions and upfront work. The first step in the process is solidifying your focus, identifying necessary resources, picking your technology and setting up the basic controls. In this part of my blog post I’ll walk through the full range of software, the options you’ll want to use (and the ones to lose) as well as help you put together a response plan and policy.

Deciding on your focus:

Chances are you’ve already identified a purpose for your forum but if not it’s important to do so before going any further in the process. While some communities combine different areas it’s more common for a company forum either to be all about support or all about product & discussion. Depending on the primary goal you’ll need different tools, technology and resources and of course will be measuring value differently. If you do decide to put both sides under one roof that’s ok too — just be prepared for more resource requirements and a larger project.

Identifying your internal resources:

Before you start any setup or customization it’s essential you know just who will be on your site and how you plan to make it work. I often see branded communities where marketing is the only one tasked with looking at things (and the only one with keys to do anything) resulting in huge gaps in support and unanswered issues.

The simple fact is your community will take time and resources. If you’re thinking you can turn your branded community into some wonderful peer to peer discussion you’re probably wrong. Very few brand communities ever end up becoming huge discussion sites and those that do are generally in very specific niches (like for a video game). Instead think about your community as a place for topical discussions where customers may come for help, to give input and to see what’s up, not somewhere they idle for hours a day waiting to talk more (although it does happen now and then).

Instead you need to be responsible for your own feedback when users aren’t around to do it. This means putting together a list of the major topics you expect to be talked about and working with people in your company to “own” them. Sometimes these people will need to post directly, other times they may just relay comments through another (like in the case of a product manager wanting to get comments on a new item or possible idea).

Often times the best resources come from your customer support department that’s already use to getting a wide range of common questions, dealing with customers individually and talking to them in an appropriate way. And while it’s good to have higher level visibility of the community don’t confuse a desire for actionable visibility with the realities of an executive who likely doesn’t have a whole lot of time to jump into discussions and may not be the best one to do so even if they do. A combination of “ground troops” and higher ups is almost always ideal.

Over time as your site grows and you do foster a discussion base it may be possible to recruit members into the system either as power users who just respond and help or potentially as moderators to handle some of the issues that face any community like abusive members, spam, etc…

Creating a response plan:

Once you have a list of resources you’ll need to develop a response plan. Response plans are basically a document or set of documents that covers exactly how you’ll respond and who will respond to issues of varying types and scale. Without a response plan all you have is resources who are support to work together on a completely virtual and very fast past system and who are unlikely to know what to do n every issue. This opens the door to areas going unanswered or getting answered by the wrong person.

With a response plan it’s clear who needs to own what and how they’ll handle it. This is an extremely important step as it’s rare that your community will be managed by enough internal people to go running around and collect answers from each resource when a question comes up (although if you drive hard enough you may just be able to get to that point). This way if an area is going unanswered you know who to point to and can figure out if there’s been a failure in the process or if resources need to be reselected based on other commitments.

Finally a response plan should cover crisis issues like a product blow up, a spam attack or a large rant. It’s important that in each scenario you know whose responsible for responding and how so that instead of trying to craft a message about a problem with that product PR knows to make one after they do their main release and post it. If there’s one things forums really require is speed and having to figure out who tackles a bunch of complaints after a long weekend isn’t acceptable in your turn around time. People will give you a little breathing room but not much,

Selecting the technology:

The first part of any branded forum is of course the forum system running it. While developing your own technology is always an option it’s probably not necessary given the number of robust products at just about every price point.

Self Service (Low Price) Providers:

On the lower end of the spectrum there’s a wide array of self-service tools designed to be installed and customized by an in-house IT team or consultant. Most of these are written by small firms or individuals to be highly flexible but are intended for more hands-on types who will be hands on in setting up features and changing layout styles. Self-service tools generally offer little customization or support from their developing companies although they come at a very cheap price point which may leave budget room for hiring outside expertise.

Self service tools are also generally backed by large and open development sites where free addons can be found to extend their core functionality adding everything from post rating modules to advanced moderation systems, surveys and much more.

Providers:

vBulletin – Likely the most popular and feature rich tool in its class. vBulletin has been in business since 2000 and offers a rich featureset of forum tools including unlimited forums, user profiles, avatars, basic polling, paid membership options, on-site private messaging and much more. vBulletin is widely selected for it’s well known interface and ease of customization.
vBulletin’s runs $180 for a lifetime license with a $60 yearly update fee.

phpBB – Another well known player in the category, phpBB is a free application released under the GNU license. phpBB offers a slightly different style and set of options but for the most part provides the same toolset as vBulletin but with an open development group rather than a company behind the product.
phpBB is offered as freeware at no cost.

Invision Power – While a direct competitor to vBulletin and phpBB, Invision Board positions its self with a slightly different service offering professional support and modification services. Out of the box Invision Power is slightly underpowered compared to phpBB or vBulletin but still provides just about every tool needed for a branded community.
Invision Power licenses start at $149 ($299 for business premium package)

Other providers: In addition to the companies I’ve specifically mentioned you may also want to look at MyBB, Yabb,SMF, and others.

Full Service (Mid-Tier & Enterprise) Providers:

While it may seem smart to pick a solution by your own company size (i.e. enterprise for enterprise) there are times where crossing into the lower (or higher segment) products may make more sense. The features you’ll find between self-service programs and the high end enterprise tools are surprisingly similar and in many cases, self-service outweighs enterprise. The real advantage of higher end tools comes from reporting, data capture options, integration, and professional support & services.

Reporting with self-service tools tends to be limited to bar graphics of posts, threads and users while enterprise tools may offer detailed analysis of activity flows, contributions, visits, time on site and more traditional web analytics. And of course the more you can see about your community, what people are doing and what they’re using, the better informed decisions will be and the more you can do to grow it rather than spending time going in the wrong direction.

Data capture (surveying and profiles) is probably the most actionable advantage of the enterprise tools and are used to bring customer data back into a single place where it can be evaluated and reviewed. For some enterprise platforms data capture includes robust surveying as well as detailed user profiles while a few providers going even further and combining micro-profiling techniques to build a user profile that grows over time.

Integration support can also be a substantial advantage for your community depending on your launch plans. By combining other data sources (profiles, purchase history, etc…) customers can be verified and identified enabling for more reliable comments and even advanced permission tools to grant access to certain members while excluding unknowns. The more data you can bring in or out of your forum the more actionable information becomes down the road and for responses.

The most noticeable difference between the self service and enterprise tools is in their support and that’s not just IT support. Enterprise packages are often backed by thought leaders and community strategists who can help your brand craft an approach for engaging customers. For a business just getting into social this can be a crucial as launching without a good understanding can lead to a complete failure and waste of time or a huge blacklash as your community becomes a place for critique rather than discussion, support and sharing. Enterprise providers can help identify these issues up front and may even have moderator staff available to help manage your community as it grows.

Finally you’ll find that enterprise providers tend to be more professionally focused on developing features that a business needs rather than ones that are peer to peer specific. You’ll also find more attention to data, usability and the customer experience on the site.

Providers:
Lithium – Providing a full range of tools from forums to blogs and chat, Lithium has been in the community space for many years and offers an enterprise version of the self service tools with a look and feel that you may find on a peer to peer community (that’s a good thing).

Clearspace Community by Jive – Perhaps the most enterprise looking tool, Jive’s platform works as a social networking platform with an approach on centricity and bringing together tools from forums to wikis in one place for the user and admin. As with Lithium, Jive is backed by an expert company with traditional type account and strategy teams available for support.

Groupee – Originally a self-service provider, Groupee has evolved into an enterprise platform that centers around forums but also offers many additional features including photo sharing and sophisticated profiling. Groupee is sold on a CPM model rather than a post volume or support engagement Groupee is much like its former self-service competitors but also extends to offer a simple API and more professional services.

Satmetrix – Less known than the other companies, Satmetrix is an enterprise provider with a less competitive looking tool and set of features but with some very powerful profiling tools. Because Satmetrix is often used for “closed” customer-only communities there’s not a lot of feature details known.

There are a lot of advantages for enterprise tools but they come at a cost, a technology dependency and sometimes don’t make sense. If you are a “larger” sized company and end up using a self service tool don’t worry, you won’t be alone.

Features to look for:

As a branded community your feature needs will be different than with a typical peer to peer community. While you may have some out of the box needs to address your particular customer segment be sure to look for this core set of features with any solution you pick or build:

- Unlimited forums, threads and posts for discussion to take place on
- User profiles that can be extended through a control panel interface to add fields & options
- User selected avatars, badges and other basic display options
- Personality options including images, smilies, and font/colors for posting
- Access to private messaging between users and site administrators
- The ability to highlight announcements and stick posts with key information
- A Permission system that allows you to identify what tools and areas users may access
- A moderation and reporting tool to control content and close or remove threads
- The ability to set alerts using email or other tools for incident reports
- Basic polling within threads to capture data (ideally sophisticated surveying as well)
- Simple access to account data to review, export and email users
- The ability to integrate with your CRM system or external database
- At least basic analytics on activity and growth of social media metrics
- Advanced controls to turn on and off features and customize options without code changes

Setting things up just right

Every forum program out there will offer you more features than you know what to do with so when it comes time to configure it all it’s easy to feel a bit overwhelmed. My suggestion is to start thinking about how you want your community used and what you’ll be ok with and build around that goal at all times as you review tab after tab of options.

Starting at the core it’s pretty obvious you’ll want different forum categories for different topics and sub-topics. For a support forum this may take the shape of different types of products, customer levels or issues. For a more general discussion community breaking things into the topics you want discussions to be centered around will encourage activity to grow in a certain direction. All forums should generally start with a category and sub-forums for announcements (site updates & happenings), product or service information (new launches), support (getting help) and possibly introductions.

Along with the forum structure there’s a good deal of access settings in most software packages to go over. Most forums can be left fairly open while others like announcements may be locked down entirely for just administrators and feedback ones may have a hybrid where users can respond to posts but not start threads. Access for editing threads is also something to look at as you consider how each internal resource should be utilized in your community and who you want to be able to make changes in the event of an issue.

Finally consider how each forum needs to look and operate. If you’re asking for support inquiries in one forum consider using a thread prefix option to make it easy for identifying types of problems and responding to them. If you’re trying to create an expert content section see if you can make your first post stick to the topic while subsequent posts show up more like comments than a threaded discussion.

Next you need to decide how users join and what information they must provide or can provide. Lock things down too far and you’ll find no one participates, ask too little and it’s hard to know who you’re speaking with. An ideal arrangement is generally to get a few basics (username, password, email, first name, customer type) as required upfront basics and then prod for additional details afterwords (post alerts until someone fills out a profile, send an email reminder, etc…). If your forum supports micro-profiling to use polls and other one off questions to add to a user’s profile be sure to consider that as well.

After you have users able to register you have to decide how much freedom to give them. Do you want everything to be about straight posts and answers or do you want some personality. This can be as simple as picking fonts and colors to be used or adding graphical badges under user profiles to denote seniority in the community, contributions and a professional role. If you’re validating customer identities be sure to acknowledge this with a badge or colored username.

Graphical options like smilies, post icons, and any other image can (and should) be tailored to fit your brand. Using your color scheme for a new post icon is great… having a smilie with a machine gun isn’t. Thankfully most forums come pretty simple out of the box so it’s more a matter of reviewing what’s been set rather than trying to remove stuff that doesn’t belong.

There’s probably also a host of control focused tools in your software package to focus on from censor options to moderating new users and threads to banning options. Review each of these to insure they’re fair (no banning all your competitor’s names unless they become an issue) but also cover you (no swearing should be tolerated or show up).

Ultimately your goal should be to make a friendly community that that has enough flexibility and personality to feel like a forum but that stops short of anything you’d find in a peer to peer community. Each customizable element should be thought of in terms of the audience, the possible benefit and abuse.

For example, avatars are a very common feature on forums and may make great sense for a branded community focused on younger consumers who are discussing a themepark business. However open access to avatars in a b2b community may make less sense and instead providing company reps with access to their logo could be a better fit. Similarly do you want to allow users to upload photos which could be used in product samples or not? Should they have access to posting links to other sites? The ability to start polls? Just about any feature can make sense for the right branded community but there’s a wide difference in what a very open, discussion oriented consumer forum can use versus a b2b or tightly focused support one.

The forum rules

After everything is setup and ready your final configuration step is to put in place a set of rules that govern what users may do, how the site works and the ownership of it all.

If you’re familiar with the recent FaceBook debates over privacy than you may be a bit worried about backlash for your rules but relax, changes are your community will have a lot less emotion tied to it than a 175+ Million user system. Still you want your rules to be clear but also fair. Users should be able to expect to be treated properly and as humans. That means not removing content just because it isn’t positive, not banning people who aren’t the biggest fans and not trying to own their thought process. On the other side you want to be clear that SPAM, swearing, flames, personal attacks and anything fraudulent or fake isn’t acceptable and will be removed. You also may want to claim use to provided content for marketing purposes (remember, people are coming to your community to interact with you – not because they want to share photos with their friends).

Remember, your rules aren’t something people will follow like a service agreement so only exclude things you plan to enforce. It’s not a fun process to ban a user from breaking one rule when half your community is breaking another one.

Your legal department may also have a thing (or 5) to say about what to include here.

Coming up next

Look back for part II of this series next week where I’ll discuss getting your community started with seed content, attracting customers and prospects and building discussions and relationships. I’ll also be diving into the bottom line results of a community and ways to measure the success in dollars earned and saved.