Matt Mullenweg gives you top tips to destroy your community quickly.

http://ma.tt/2009/08/kill-your-community/

The first point “don’t moderate” is a key pitfall that we warn about when helping customers set up communities.  Software is only part of the solution to your online community.  You’ll also need to make a commitment in time and effort to your user base.

Online communities are like restaurants in that if you see an quiet one with nobody in it you tend to go somewhere else. So how do you launch a community that by definition won’t have any members on day one? Luckily we live in the age of the internet so there are some things you can do.

1. Look through your existing support cases or email conversations and build up a selection of real content that is available at launch
2. Make your web site members automatically members of your community by importing them or using an SSO
3. Launch your community internally and have real conversations between your employees on the site before you make it public

This isn’t a complete list by any means but it is a good start.

You know that you need to support your customers online with some sort of online community solution. There are many pieces of software out there to help you do it that vary from being just blogs or forums to complete solutions. What happens once the site is running though? How do you collect feedback about what is essentially a feedback and support site?

Managing your online community well is crucial to your success. Happy customers make referrals. Unhappy customers rant and complain about you to as many people as they can. Your community efforts are only beginning once you have a software solution in place but how much did you look into the features that help you manage your customers? Is it easy to find success stories as well as people that might be struggling? Can power users find other users in the community that need help and help them without your intervention? Can you find easily identify who these power users are so you can reward them?

These are some of the issues that we are tackling in our new community software. Stay tuned to find out more.