I attended the Thinking Digital Conference at The Sage in Newcastle, Gateshead last week. I would recommend this conference to anyone who’s in the digital sector and wants to find out the latest trends and thought leadership.

There were some outstanding seminars – the ones I really found inspiring were from:

• Stowe Boyd – reclaiming the social space
  
• Mike Southon – being a successful entrepreneur
• Tara Shears – talking about the big bang and CERN
• Jonny Chung Lee – presented new ideas in human – computer interaction
• Caleb Chung – kids toy inventor
• Alex Hunter – Head of Online for Virgin Group
• Tara Hunt – creating your Whuffie factor – the value of your social capital in the online world

I was in awe of the presentation by Alex Hunter and the launch of the online community around the Virgin brand. A bold move, but one they won’t regret. They are embracing the new wave of social web and moving from being brand guardians to brand custodians. A move mos big brands are afraid of doing.

Tara Hunt gave a great presentation about boosting your Whuffie factor – which is the value of your social capital in the digital world.

So putting these presentations together started me thinking about building and managing online communities. So are great and some are a complete flop – but what are the factors at play which determine their success? Having been working with the team at Reach Further, I’ve started to understand the magic ingredients.

Getting the word out……..
You can’t just put up a community (unless you are an awesomely huge brand such as Virgin) and hope members join and start participating. You have to think about your community in the real world – and how you would start getting customers into your store or restaurant. You don’t just open the door and hope people flood in. You start marketing your new restaurant in the local vicinity and newspapers.

The online version of marketing in the local vicinity and newspapers is to ensure you seed you are present in the conversations around your content- whether this is on Digg, facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. Creating a killer application – perhaps on facebook or on Linked In. This is where boosting your whuffie factor will boost the success to the sign up rate on your community.

Getting to know you
Once people are starting to sign up they need to be made to feel welcome – the equivalent would the front of house in a restaurant and directing you to an appropriate table. You’d then be seated, given nibbles and told of the specials of the day.

Ensuring your new members are made welcome and sign posted to relevant content is important. Making sure you have a purpose for the community is important to the overall success – is it to get feedback on your products and services or to stimulate discussion around a topic (such as landscape photography).

I like what I see…..
Once you have got people through the door and seated at the tables, you then need to start getting people within the community to start sharing information – which meal off the menu do you recommend?, Have you been to this restaurant before? Generating community specific content is crucial to retaining the interest of the members – get exclusive interviews or webinars….that type of thing!

Can I take your number
If it’s a success, members will start spontaneously chatting, sharing information – perhaps meet up in the real world? (such as photographers meeting in a forum and then meeting up on location!). Acquiring and retaining your members is then an ongoing cycle…..

Other tips that I’ve picked up onlong the way:

1. Building an online community takes time, start with a blog and get comments on there

2. Using Drupal is a good open source platform to base your community on

3. The content on the public part of the site needs to be your shop window – to entice members in. So it needs to be inviting, authentic and relevant

4. Sign up to the community needs to be as easy as possible – don’t take all the personal information at once. Build up trust and let them build their profile.

5. Make sure you moderator the community – you need to be in control

I felt that I was on the cusp of the new wave of the social web. It’s exactly where I was 12 years ago when I moved into online marketing – and Google started boosting it’s market share. There’s a new way of building your brand and driving traffic to your website.

Come on in……now then, where would you like to sit?