As a father of two, I hear "why" a lot: "Why do you get goose bumps?" "Why are traffic signals red, yellow and green?" "Why does [best friend] have [shiny object] and I don't?" (the Internet can only help so much) Perhaps that partly explains why the first question I like to ask new customers is "Why do you need to build a new community?" Most of the time the first responses I hear are "our customers are asking for one" or "our competitors have one". And these are indeed very powerful reasons, but they are not necessarily business objectives that you can track to measure success. In the excellent book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, they refer to this in their POST method as your objectives for creating an online community. I would go even further, that objectives must be measurable for an enterprise community for them to have any lasting value. After all, in the enterprise measurable results are often the only ones that matter. During our planning for the Lithosphere, we focused on three business objectives we wanted to achieve: Build customer loyalty: Includes traditional customer satisfaction metrics, as well as others like increased rate of feature adoption. Improve Lithium's products and services: Both through direct product feedback, but for Lithium there is also the opportunity to learn lessons from using the products we sell (i.e. "eating our own dog food"). Increase sales: New sales are important, but as a SaaS provider we also benefit from the greater success of our customers' communities through tier growth. By choosing objectives with measurable success in mind, you can not only begin to build your case for ROI; you can lean on these objectives for each decision you make about your community and back it up with a clear relationship to what you are trying to achieve. Here are some other objectives we've seen executed effectively in enterprise communities: Case/Call deflection Increase brand loyalty Strategic savings for multilingual customers & long-tail customer support Discover brand success stories Backup to the standard support setup/Spike handling Track success of marketing initiatives Faster identification of issue clusters Grow 3rd-party development around your platform Hardly comprehensive, but hopefully this list is a good starting point to help think through what your community success will be. If you can think of others, or want to share which objectives have resonated most with your community please let me know! Message Edited by scottd on 06-18-2008 10:15 AM ... View more

The last group I wanted to discuss before leaving the topic of people in your community is your internal audience, be they employees, organizational peers, executives or other insiders. Like the previous groups we've mentioned, you need to understand and plan for these folks, and the internal team presents it's own unique challenges. There are two types of activity you must be mindful of: As active participants in the community As consumers of the community content Regarding participation, we recognized that the Lithosphere was going to be a smaller, more intimate community than many of the ones we deploy for our customers. With that in mind, we expect that we will likely need more engagement internally than is the norm to sustain a healthy level of activity. But while we want to encourage employees to participate in the conversation, we need to be careful not to dominate it. Toward that end we created an employee-specific addendum to our guidelines that addressed internal user behavior, while also developing a rank structure to identify general Lithium employees but visually represent them on a peer level with other members. We also plan to give employees additional motivation to come, such as a private area of their own to discuss internal topics of interest. In short, take a look at all the ways we can influence community behavior, and then see how you might apply them to meet the challenges of this particular audience. Passive activity is more subtle, but more than with any other group this is where the real value lies. After all, to be truly successful requires that someone do something with what the community generates at the end of the day. For instance, one of our main objectives in the Lithosphere is product improvement through direct customer feedback. The time to discuss how to address product feedback from the community is not after the VP of Product Management has received a query from the Customer Advisory Board! Communicate your message and expectations clearly and early to internal groups who will be involved. Then develop processes to escalate requests internally and to communicate back to the community. The message is not that customer feedback from the community will be immediately addressed, or even that the highest rated requests will be the quickest to be adopted; community feedback being only one factor in a larger process of prioritizing development resources. But a clear understanding on both sides is necessary so that the expectations we set are clear and attainable. This is just one example. Who else have you made sure to reach out to when launching your community? ... View more

I spoke of defining your target audience last time, but as was noted in the comments you should be aware that they aren't the only folks who may choose to participate. For example, some other groups we identified as potential visitors/participants in the Lithosphere with differing needs and agendas are: Banned users from our customers' communities Community managers for non-enterprise communities Competitors Solicitors/ Spammers Hackers with unlawful intentions Promotion, structure, policies and procedures - virtually every aspect of your community plan should take into account these other groups and their potential impact on your objectives. This doesn't mean that groups outside our target audience should be ejected; after all, as long as members' activity furthers the goals of the community then their contributions should be welcome. In fact, you may gain powerful insights from outside your main base that would otherwise have escaped you. But it is vital that those other users not be allowed to interfere with or derail your community. Our aim for the Lithosphere is to be the premier place to share ideas, support others and exchange best practices on community in the enterprise. To meet our objectives and the objectives of our target audience, we've made sure to: Craft announcements, board descriptions, promotional materials and blogs (such as this one) to reinforce our focus on enterprise community Design our board structure to prominently display the most relevant content and provide less highly-placed outlets for submissions that are not as relevant, as well as private areas for approved members only Develop and communicate clear guidelines and procedures to empower moderators to keep submissions relevant and the tone positive Obviously details and execution are extremely important here, but the key point is to focus on promoting desired behavior and discouraging inappropriate activity no matter its origin. What unexpected visitors have you received in your community? Was the experience ultimately a positive or negative one? ... View more