Ipso Fakto the Defakto Blog

Is your online community struggling? Look back to take your community forward.

Posted on: Friday, June 10, 2011 by Ken Vernon

Your online community has become stagnant or there was never anyone there in the first place. What do you do? The first thing you should do is to look back.
 
Looking back at the development and launch of the community will tell you a lot about what you need to do going forward. You should start with the original objectives. Objectives should have been the starting point then and it should be the starting point now. What are the objectives and who is the audience?

Now look at your results. There are two typical scenarios:
1. Ghost community from the beginning. The community just never took off. It went live, had staff designated to manage and nothing happened.
2. Stagnant community slowly becoming a ghost town. There was good activity to start off but that activity is slowly dropping off and has reached a point of no new activity.
 
With the first scenario, you have to look at your planning from the beginning of the project through the launch.

You should have defined your objectives, identified the target audience for potential members, established a community that would be enticing to the target audience and…here's where you probably missed it...there should have been a marketing and promotional campaign executed to create interest and awareness of your new community. Did you do that?
 
Don't feel bad if the answer is no. Not executing an appropriate launch campaign is the most common reason communities are not successful.  Many branded, online community efforts are driven by needs that are not always related to the marketing effort, support communities or partner communities for example. So many times the critical step of creating awareness of the new community with a promotional campaign targeted at the potential member audience is simply not considered.
 
If that is the case with your community, it's not too late. You can put together a campaign to re-launch the community to your target audience. If you're not in a marketing role, get with the marketing or PR group in your organization and get a plan together. This plan should absolutely include as much social engagement as possible, but should be formulated as a campaign that creates awareness and drives traffic using the channels that will get this message in front of your target audience. Email, snail mail, banner ads, social media, it should all be considered.
 
As they say, just because you built it, doesn't mean they will come...you have to ask them to come. At Defakto we help our clients get their community off to a great start and we also help jumpstart stagnant communities with relaunch campaigns.
 
Then once they get there, you need to make sure they are welcomed with open arms and given compelling reasons to come back.
 
That takes us to scenario number two. But this blog post has gotten a little long. I'll address Scenario Two in the next post.

 

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