capable networks community best practices
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Planning and Executing a Successful Strategy for Engaging Your Customers OnlineTRANSCRIPT
Best Practices for Your Online Community
Planning and Executing a Successful StrategyFor Engaging Your Customers Online
v3.4 - February 2007
© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Keys to Good Community Planning
Keep content fresh and relevant for visitors
Acquire your audience and continuously drive traffic to the site
Identify, engage, and reward prominent community members
Gather important preferences, demographics, and buying habits from visitors
Leverage the platform to effectively drive and measure marketing promotions
Fold in new, compelling features: tag clouds, podcasts, RSS, social bookmarking
Build a runtime environment that is both scalable, reliable, and secure
Create an objective discussion forum that encourages healthy dialogue
Detect long-term consumer trends or short-term bursts of activity/interest
Fold in competitive community sites that inevitably splinter the consumer base
Compelling Content
Membership Growth
Subject Matter Experts
Visitor Data
Product Sales
Infrastructure Needs
Free Speech
Platform Evolution
Thorough planning is the key to creating
a successful online community
Trendspotting
Competitive Sites2
© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Planning for Compelling Content
Highlight the most relevant content from continuous flow of member contributions
Offer multiple vehicles for sharing information, especially among members
Pull in related and complementary content from external sources
Our patent-pending Scoring Engine accurately identifies most valuable content
Community Platform has built-in blogs, formal articles, discussion forums, newsletters, private messaging, and more
Support for formal and informal aggregation of web content
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Planning for Membership Growth
Create compelling reasons for becoming a registered member
Simplify registration process and ensure accuracy of credentials
Deploy a variety of vehicles to maximize return visits
Be respectful to all members at all times
Institute safeguards to protect member privacy
Membership required to post content, collaborate with others
Free registration requires roundtrip email verification
Newsletters, Email Notifications, RSS, Private Messaging, and more
All communication to members is based on opt-in preferences
Member email and personal information is never accessible
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Develop process to accurately identify prominent members
Provide channels for engaging experts in the community
Provide incentives and rewards for members to step up and take leadership roles
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Planning for Subject Matter Experts
Scoring Engine continuously measures member credibility, proficiency, and user rank
Private groups create separate discussion areas
Delegate editorial power to Moderators, Member Scoreboard creates friendly competition, invitations to Beta Tests, revenue share, free gear, and more
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Planning for Visitor Data
Capture, analyze and report on visitor habits and preferences on the site
Gather visitor demographics, product ownership, buying habits
Identify and respond to current product support issues
Analyze and adjust to leverage most effective community vehicles
Platform tracks and reports on visitor activity as they interact with content and members
Registration, user profile, and surveys used to capture key data
Active threads can be easily identified and tracked to keep abreast of customer problems
Data warehouse and analytical reports provide critical insight into community health
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Recruit product enthusiasts to build a secondary sales team
Use community influencers to create launch upgrade, up sell, and customer referral campaigns
Leverage platform vehicles to help drive marketing promotions
Planning for Product Sales
Member scoring system quickly identifies target influencers and evangelists
Community incentives used to build rewards-based programs
Boost campaigns through newsletters, announcements, contests, banner ads, and more
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Incorporate robust CMS solution to accommodate a widening variety of content types
Identify and leverage architectural hooks to plug in new features and components over time
Track industry trends, web evolution to fold in next-gen community tools
Planning for Platform Evolution
Custom-built content management platform provides flexibility for broad range of mixed content
Capable owns entire architecture stack and can completely customize community instance
Roadmap has produced blogs, RSS, podcasts, photo sharing, member projects, and moreFuture releases to bring video content, folksonomies, tag clouds, social bookmarking, web services, mashups, …
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Secure a robust hosting solution to deliver high performance and reliability
Allocate sufficient bandwidth to handle traffic growth/spikes
Protect content/data using proven backup & restore capabilities
Establish separate “mirror” environment for testing/staging
Planning for Infrastructure Needs
Partner with Rackspace, a world-class hosting facility
Service level provides network capacity to deliver superior response
Automated fulł/incremental backups by hosting provider; rapid data restore in event of failure
Capable manages a complete secondary mirror deployment for each community
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Establish objective forum where visitors feel they can speak openly
Enlist and clearly identify forum moderators as impartial actors
Find balance between heavy-handed policing and free-for-all
Planning for Free Speech
Independently owned and operated community site creates clear division from company
Capable staff recruits prominent members from community and formally recognizes them on site
Promotes social culture for healthy dialog, honesty, no spamming, no bullying, etc.
BEST PRACTICE CAPABLE SOLUTION
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Identify metrics that accurately report on community pulse
Reactively and proactively respond to shifts in activity/interests
Assign company resources to actively participate in community
Planning for Trendspotting
Separately track member interest in individual items, content categories, active discussions, and in other members
Analytical reports provide fine-grained data to build custom alerts
Encourage member-to-employee connections by spotlighting company personalities & contributions
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© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved
Look to assimilate other sites that have the potential to splinter your customer base
Partner with dedicated enthusiasts to create more inclusive “virtual community”
Conduct routine competitive analysis to stay abreast of peripheral activities
Planning for Competitive Sites
Established track record of reaching out to related fan-sites and folding them into dominant community
Continuously refining diplomacy skills to keep hardliners engaged in friendly competition
Capable dedicated to CE vertical, uses variety of research tools and techniques to remain current
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