Successful communities don’t just spring to life. In our experience they evolve, organically, and they have to be guided and tended like any living growing thing.

We take very seriously our obligation to share our own experience with each of our customers, to help them cultivate a community experience that supports their business goals. One feature of our ongoing  relationship with each customer is the periodic meetings we have to plot the next phase of their community experience. I recently conducted just such an early stage implementation review and thought some of the insights we surfaced would be worth sharing.

As we analysed the impact of the first phase of the client’s community, we were particularly pleased with the high levels of engagement they had achieved, especially within their forums. The customer had also made extensive use of the Pluck Reputation Engine. As a result they had succeeded in creating a community culture that encouraged contribution, and they’d created a mechanism for identifying their best brand advocates. These were all great first steps!

It was immediately clear that we had a strong foundation of engagement and advocacy upon which to build. The balance of the review was spent in discussion of community features which would subtly take the community to the next level.  Some of the ideas are below:

1)      We suggested they make more extensive use of Pluck Collections. Collections are a mechanism for surfacing the community’s best-rated or most-consumed contributions. Putting Collections next to the site’s editorial content creates multiple entry points into what the community regards as the relevant conversations. For this particular client, whose business objective is to create more conversion opportunities, appropriately placed Collections can highlight product-related content and contributions with high levels of customer advocacy.

2)      The young community’s advocates were doing a fantastic job of expressing their own enthusiasm for the brand and its products, but we all felt they needed more recognition. We recommended that our customer promote their advocates to a “Featured” user tier and give their contributions greater visibility. In our experience this encourages advocates and strengthens their affinity with the brand, while fostering an ongoing supply of quality contributions.

3)      We noted that the brand staff members were not very visible in the community. The brand acknowledged that it had been a bit of an absentee landlord. We helped them formulate a plan to increase brand participation in the community. Staff members will become part of the conversation, where appropriate, answering questions and publicly dealing with community issues. Brand staff members will be part of a “Staff” user tier and will be clearly identified as such at the avatar level. In our experience this sends solid signals that the brand cares about the community and is invested in its success.

4)      In the first phase photo contributions were only available via the Persona blog, which meant there was no central location for viewing photos. A public gallery seemed like a better approach for encouraging quality consumer generated content around common themes that resonated more closely with the primary services that the brand offered.

The account review was a valuable experience for us and our client. It served as a reminder that every brand has its own unique DNA, and that an iterative, “organic” approach is key to developing successful integrated communities.