Jon Mountjoy's Blog

Writing about the scarily named Blog Council, Robert Scoble says:

Visit a Best Buy store. Now imagine that store without ANY human beings inside. What do you have? A bankrupt store. So why when I visit BestBuy.com don’t I see any people? Hear any conversations? Is there any wonder why Amazon has a P/E ratio much higher than Best Buy?

While I'm giving this a different tack here, I think this is a great way to think about a community web site. In a recent talk I gave I spoke about the difference between managing a successful website (rising page views, etc.) and a successful community. They aren't the same thing. Many so-called community websites are simply websites. They are empty—devoid of life. Lacking any human beings, as Robert says. So:

If you're managing a community website, you need to surface that community on the website. Not only should you enable conversations, but you should highlight those conversations, and the people doing the talking. Show potential community members that you're a website with real people having real conversations.

How

Some ways in which this can be done:

• Have the community manager call out great conversation that occurred that day/week on his/her blog/newsletter and so on
• Select a few conversations to be highlighted on the home page
• Provide mechanisms that allow your community members to flag great content, and highlight that
• Go semantic. Some sites have great metadata. If a forum message on the forum called "TopicX" is related to blogs on "TopicX", and your community flags a message as 5 stars, how about highlighting that forum message in the side bar of blogs on that same topic?
• Invest in MVP programs (Microsoft have an interesting MVP program)

Caveats

Sometimes you find websites that do surface the conversations on websites. However, the result is a webpage with dozens of topics and reams of writing. Nobody is going to read all of that. When doing some of this, keep a few things in mind:

• Think about usability, about how people read websites
• Provide some editorial. Have a community manager select great conversations, perhaps massage descriptions (to read better, shorter - not skew the message) and so on.
• Don't overdo it. Think about the value you are providing to your audience.