Resources required to maintain your successful online community

In a previous article, we discussed some of the benefits of building an online community.  Among these are the opportunity to increase the visibility of your company with your customers, partners, and employees.

Today, let's have some straight talk about the resources your company will need to grow and maintain a thriving online community.  Your friendly neighborhood IT specialist can give you the skinny on your technical resource demands so let's focus today on the personnel resources you'll need to grow and maintain a success online community.

This resource is probably more important in many ways than the technical one -- but it's also the one many companies are likely to short change.  Because no matter how wiz bang cool your online community site is, if you don't have people maintaining it, then your community members will abandon you and your community will die.

Suggestions for how to manage the personnel resource demand

Content manager(s) or editor

First, we always recommend you have at least one individual assigned as a the content manager or editor for your online community channel.  This is the individual or team who will "own" the content in the various community channels like your blog, wiki, knowledge base or group forum.  And we recommend this individual have key performance indicators tied to his or her management.

Subject matter experts

Of course, your content manager doesn't necessarily have to create all the content for a community channel.  Indeed, for some channels like a wiki or knowledge base, it would make more sense to seek contributions from subject matter experts.  In this situation, then the content manager(s) would have overall editorial oversight and ensured the timely submission of content and that is meets your internal editorial standards for release.

For example, one of my clients undertook blogging.  The marketing VP has overall editorial responsibility for the blog, but the company is using five subject matter experts as article contributors.  The VP has assigned someone to perform a final edit on the articles, and this may involve some reshaping for search engine optimization purposes or to improve readability. 

Hold contributors accountable

However you decide to do it, your content editors and providers need to be 100% accountable for maintaining their authorship, editorship, or oversight role in their realm of the overall community. 

Don't accept "promises" from employees that they'll contribute to the community.  Sure as shooting, work demands are going to impinge somewhere, some time and the temptation will be to put aside the community activities in favor of "real work." 

Trust me.  Been there, seen that and if you let that happen, then that's when you're community starts to die. 

So now you decide...

The bottom line regarding collaborative communities is this.  They're a great way to extend your corporate and product brand -- if you're willing to invest in and maintain them. They will require a focused effort to build and maintain -- just like every other functional area to which your company is committed.

If you're company isn't ready or prepared to make the personnel investment, then you're better-served avoiding online communities until you are.

However, if you are ready and do make the personnel contribution, then you will gain the benefits of increased visibility across your external or internal audiences.  And, of course, increased visibility will lead your company towards increased opportunities.  Depending on the nature of your community -- customers, partners, or employees -- these opportunities could include new sales or partnerships leading to higher revenues, or inspired employee creativity that could lead to the next big thing or, less glamorously to lower expenses.

Until next time, over and out.