Now that you’ve identified your resources, technology and got a head start on setting up your community’s options it’s time to get it launched, growing and turn it into something your business can benefit from at the bottom line.

Seeding the community

Communities with no activity, no content and no members fall flat on their faces no matter how strong the brand behind them may be as visitors end up without anything to participate in and all alone. Thus before any emails go out, announcements are released or the world gets to see your community it’s absolutely essential that there be some level of seeding to provide a foundation and work out the kinks.

Seeding a community doesn’t necessarily mean faking discussions or users but rather is about strategically building content. Content starts

Once there’s a small base of users, FAQs, and other resource relevant content it’s time to bring in an “alpha” group. For a peer-to-peer forum this generally means a group of known associates who are already interested in the topic. Brands of course don’t tend to have any such group so customers have to be used and ideally those customers are ones with a high affinity and loyalty for the brand (segment “A”). Getting the seed group started is all about identifying a short list of customers (a few hundred ideally) and preparing an email to invite them into the beta site.

For many people being invited to the “prelaunch” is an impressive feat and something that makes them rally behind the site & brand and contribute heavily. Of course not everyone will end up sticking around or even show up in the first place which is why it’s important to ask enough people to join, have enough staff involvement to make it clear that your commitment to the community and introduce enough topics through your internal seeding process to give them somewhere to start.

Once your seed group has had some time on the community it’s time to bring people in before they run out of discussion topics or interest.

Launching to the world

An ideal launch is fast, heavy and hard driving as much activity as is possible. While it’s possible to launch with just a new link on the navigation bar or bit in a newsletter email small launches tend to lead to small membership numbers and therefore limited growth potential as visitors see little going on to compel them to join the branded community versus a peer to peer one in the same space.

Launch tactics start with traditional promotional changes like adding the community link to navigation elements and email templates, sending out a dedicated announcement email. The opportunity for real growth however is in pushing to other sources – including community relevant information on packaging (“for support see www.oursite.com/support) , in instore materials, directly in ad campaigns (“get comments from real customers”) and of course social networking channels (networks, tools and even other communities).

Launching also means morphing existing community related campaigns to include or point to the new forum. For some brands this is as simple as directing keywords like “discuss XYZ”, “XYZ reviews” or “XYZ forums” to the forums while for those with more robust community tools it may mean a new blog post and link on the blog structure, an updated twitter profile, an announcement to facebook fans and so on.

The more distribution points brought into the initial launch the more successful it will be. For some companies even going so far as to buy media to promote the community makes sense but often times a community can get started without any real marketing or ad costs although it’s always a good idea.

Develop a strategy for long-term growth

Like a gym or any subscription based business, forums have a natural growth and attrition pattern that, despite all the effort in the world, never goes away. For branded communities these retention rates can be very, very short with the majority of new signups joining the site, posting one or two questions and then bailing. Even those users who stick around and become active participants will eventually drop off whether it’s months or years later. This is normal but requires that there be a constant influx of new visitors to the community to refill both the short term and long term membership rates.

This of course means continuing to visibly drive traffic far into the future and well beyond the initial seed and launch efforts. For the most part a long term strategy can look much like the initial launch strategy but with a clear path for continuing to build engagement. Setting objectives for monthly member acquisitions, a list of forums and social networking tools to be involved in, and offline or product standards to continue to highlight the community help to insure that membership doesn’t stagnate.

Beyond direct promotion long term growth can also be achieved by building a word of mouth campaign behind the community. Communities that make it easy for members to bring in their own contacts and social networks to show photos, have their peers get answers and so forth lend well to social media sharing. Being responsive and proactive can also draw in mass social media attention on blogs and larger networks or PR all of which helps keep people aware and coming in.

Keeping long term growth also means long term moderation and response. While it’s tempting to put effort into the initial launch and then pass the day to day off to volunteer moderators or a lone customer service agent that won’t cut it. Keeping the “brand” involved with engagement from more senior roles and the marketing team is a long term part of a community and without engagement the community will suffer while much of the opportunity for value will be lost.

Keeping up with questions

Just as involvement is essential for growth it’s also essential for getting a positive vibe on the community. Forums that leave their users without answers for days on end tend to find hostile members who consider the brand old, slow and not good. Equally damaging if there is not a constant level of involvement from the brand users may begin to feel complete ownership of the community as it has become “theirs” instead of

Keeping up is as important as launching in the first place and to do so it’s important to be active in bringing forum content to the resources assigned to manage it (see part I for more on resources allocation). Luckily most forums allow members to receive updates when topics are started or responded to and some can even be extended to send SMS updates. Larger communities may require moving away from email and following RSS feeds which easily showcase active topics.

User alerts can also be helpful in responding to issues like spam, abuse and misplaced threads and should be farmed out to a number of resources such that someone is available to deal with them as often as possible. If a community has volunteer moderators they will likely take care of most of these issues but since the community ultimately reflects on the brand it’s important that their actions are followed up on to insure fair and equitable treatment of all members.

Of course email alerts are only as good as the response given to them which is why it’s essential that someone manage the greater view of the community and check into subforums and issues to insure answers are coming, are satisfactory and fit in with the direction of the community.

Aside from alerts and administrative checks, having resources review the forum at large is by far the best way to keep up with the pulse of it. Successful branded communities exist beyond Q&A type questions and by having brand resources respond in forums from welcome areas to general topical discussion helps show knowledge, expertise and fosters a better relationship between the brand and the user base.

Some moderation required.

Eventually all forums require moderation be it removing of blatant SPAM, discussions of a competitor, inappropriate users or flagrant trolling. For the most part moderation is a straight forward process that is more about timeliness than thought (removing spam is a matter of getting there quickly to hit delete) however there are times where it becomes much more about politics and user relationships. Whenever a user crosses the line attacking another member, flaming the brand or doing anything else that would get their post removed or pulled the process becomes much more delicate and requires a step back. Users and posts will have to be removed from time to time although often times merely engaging with them to point out the issue can be enough to stop future problems.

When a user does end up past the line and needs to be removed the process should be done so much like a termination with documentation gathered and stored, the user notified and their account immediately removed. Comments and questions about the ban are ideally responded to once without diving into specifics and closed. Sometimes users are happy to see the user removed, other times there is backlash but so long as the decision was made fairly and appropriately it will generally be forgotten in time.

Following and enforcing the community rules put in place during the setup phase of the process is the single most important step in moderation and in the event that the rules don’t cover an action they must be expanded before action is taken.

Growth through features

While expertise, responses and visibility all help get people interested in the community it’s almost always features that separate a community. For branded communities featuresets tend to be pretty straight toward and basic but they can and should be thought of as expansion areas. A brand trying to encourage customers to share photos would do well to add a more robust photo gallery if they don’t have one. A dating company looking to bring their users together in telling stories about their matches may add a tool to let users crate individual blogs rather than full threaded discussions. A manufacturer may build a simple interface to let customers comment on the service, value or deals they got at different retail points.

By finding innovative ways to show products, stories, experiences and get users interacting the community becomes more useful and people have more reason to share it and stick around themselves.

Finding real bottom line ($) value from the community

Ultimately communities aren’t about following trends or being social (hopefully). They’re about measurable results for the business. Like most social networking measurement and bottom line results aren’t a simple item to report on and understand. Conversions are generally not immediate, may not use a preferred tracking link and are often not even part of the discussion.

In fact the measurement process begins before any posts are made, reports are opened or data is gathered. The first step isn’t about data, it’s about goals. While many executives will point to a community as a source for conversions and ask that reporting prove how many such actions took place, that’s not the way to measure community value. Conversions are ultimately just one piece of the puzzle and generally a difficult one to track. Instead communities must be measured on a variety of metrics from awareness & positive impact to reductions in support and eventually conversions. Each of these elements will of course have a different weight for every brand which is why they have to be discussed before a community is launched or measured. For some businesses merely reducing support can “prove” the tactic while others will aim for a combination of sales lift and brand impact.

Measuring these elements is a difficult challenge as most of anything “concrete” takes place down the road and long after the community visit meaning no tracking links, few cookies and a lot of soft value in awareness. Even support issues are hard to measure as having a forum may bring more people forward solving issues that plague repurchase rates and satisfaction but which would have never been asked with a phone only support system making it hard to determine cost savings to support vs lift in customer loyalty.

To discover into community impact which can take time and also have immediate analytics companies generally divide reporting into two areas – community metrics and business metrics.

Community metrics refer to actions on the community which can often be correlated to a business value. For example, if user registration grows 20% a month for 2 years it’s clear that there is more value from the community. If posts in the support forum are made by 20 unique customers a month there’s much lower support reduction than if they’re made by 2,000 unique customers. If the average visitor remains active to the community for 120 days versus 30 days it’s likely the community has improved their brand loyalty.

Each community metric can be further delved into by profiling customers, using survey or segmentation data to understand who they are and for some businesses even correlating it against sales.

For example, a subscription business selling online may look to have each community member tagged to a customer ID and then compare the length of stay of users who visit the community frequently versus those who visit infrequently vs those who have never visited.

For a more traditional etailer, measuring future sales for community members by looking at email addresses and possibly even data captured in the community profile may help to explain a lift in sales rates.

This sort of analysis leads into the second and most sought after data – business metrics. Business metrics are reports or data points that indicate a direct business impact. While these are hard to fully vet (you’ll never know every conversion that was related to your community) there are a few simple ones that are a good starting place. Tagging forum links for conversions will give some picture of conversion rates; giving users tracked referral links can even further extend this. Community specific promotions and coupons also add to the conversion picture. For support looking at customer calls versus support forum tickets can show the number of inquiries and the potential reduction in costs that meant. Feedback and surveys can be correlated to money saved from conducting formal research and testing.

These insights only start to scratch the surface and real digging, profiling and correlating is required to really understand lift. Since most brands ultimately turn back to conversions as a measure of success most research focuses around this. Asking customers in a generalized way how they heard about the business and if they were referred or if they used the forum is one way to pick up on larger conversion trends. Looking at regional or time specific sales in relation to community membership or promotions is another. But again, conversions are only a small part of the forum picture and evaluating awareness, positive social comments (to other sites) and community participation can show results that are far more beneficial than a few direct sales.

Ultimately every branded community should strive to create a comprehensive report showing known (certain) impact to support, awareness and sales as well as inferred value (surveyed referrals, reductions to call volume since launch, improvement social comments, better brand interest in measurement studies, etc…). Only through a comprehensive report can a brand really start to understand the overall value being brought in from the community.

Long term success & the “dream” goal of communities

While most branded communities remain functional sites there are some that start small and end up growing into much larger discussion portals home to diverse topic arrays and a whole lot of search engine listings, viral buzz and opportunity. This is the ultimate result for any branded community and while rare it is something that can be marched towards. Having a sticky and wide topic is certainly important (a tv show or video game has a lot more discussion possibility than a screw or computer mouse) but beyond that there’s no single tip that will take your community to this point. However by listening to the requests of users, finding features to expand and offer and by understanding that ultimately even your branded community is owned in great part by your users (without them you have no community) you can take the steps appropriate to bring your community down that road and perhaps to mass market success.

But even without a huge audience just having engagement is a huge opportunity to improve relationships, gather insights and even drive some sales for any company.

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Missed part one of this series? Find out more about setting up your community including software selection, configuration and resource allocation.