The Two Most Important People For Your Communities

For most organizations today implementing a community is like buying a prom dress.

They look for the fanciest, more embellished one they can find.  The one that will make them look better than anyone else, that will make everyone talk about them.  The dress must have a brand name, and sequins, and be cut to fit perfectly.  The dress that will be worn once for six hours and never be worn again.

Communities are built with all the bells and whistles, monitoring tools, fancy management tools – and once they are deployed are ignored and let to languish after a short time.  We did what we were supposed to do, we deployed a community to rave reviews – it is not our fault if people don’t use it.

Deploying a killer community is only 10% of the battle (I wrote about how to do it before).  The other 90% is the long-term caring and maintenance of it that ensures long-term viability.  It takes two specific people:

A Content Administrator will

• ensure that the necessary content is placed in the community — identify experts to contribute, remove wrong or bad entries, edit hard to read entries to ensure clarity
• empower experts, whether internal or external, to grow the community
• administer content and incorporate it into a knowledge-base – tag, index, categorize, edit and improve if needed

A Culture Manager will

• transform the community into a powerful business tool and prod adoption by internal and external people
• look beyond experts and content to see how to create a self-supporting community based on reputation
• introduce additional features that will make the community more sticky and gain mindshare

What does your prom dress look like?  Will you wear it in six months again?