February 2000   

The Internet helps make shopping quicker, research faster, and connecting with individuals from around the globe easier than ever. Stella Stenroos, from Bray County, Ireland, connects regularly through several online communities, including Bray Forum and Virtual Ireland. "You can be a part of a virtual community from home, which is comfortable," she says, "and your community can have members from all over the world, which generally makes the world feel a bit smaller!"

Defining Online Community

Community, in the online sense, implies shared interests, not shared geography. And it doesn't matter how the connection occurs. A sense of community can develop via email, through message boards, in online chats, through personalized visits to content areas, or through a combination of communication technology. Some communities, such as the discussion forums at Motley Fool, an investment forum, are designed to share specific information. Others like iVillage, an online women's community, are designed to foster a sense of friendship and camaraderie.

Few people believe that online communities can totally replace face-to-face communication, but they do have their advantages. And one of the prime advantages, according to Internet community development expert, Jim Cashel, President and CEO of Forum One, is that "communities can form over narrow topics in ways that simply can't take place in the real world."

Martina Boone, Managing Director of The Write Edge, puts it another way. "Community, in the online sense, provides a way to gather an audience receptive to your product pitch, and to keep them on your site longer so that you can provide increased exposure for your company identity and value propositions. You also get more opportunities to sell them your products and services, and to take advantage of cross-sell opportunities for additional products or affiliate products that add to your revenue stream."

How an Online Community Can Help Your Business

Turning community into cash is an increasingly popular model. With hundreds of merchants offering identical or similar merchandise for identical or similar prices, community can be the discriminator that sets a site apart. And unlike in the real world where shopping around can be time consuming, online comparison shopping only takes a few clicks of the mouse. Keeping customers from clicking away is just as important as getting them to your site in the first place. In fact, building a successful e-business is four-step process. You must:

• Give them a reason to visit: People generally only visit online stores if they're shopping for something, but building an online community can encourage visitors to come just to look around and connect with other customers.
   

• Encourage browsing: If yours is a specialty site, building an online community will encourage users to connect with other users to share advice and information instead of going on immediately to look for other sites that carry the same products.
   

• Inspire loyalty: Web surfers become fiercely devoted to their online communities and online friendships can become very important. Providing opportunities to encourage those friendships can have big rewards. David Albert, who teaches an Online Communities class at Harvard University, said online communities can help your business by "drawing customers back. If they are members of an active community then it has become a part of their lives and they will return again and again."
   

• Generate referrals: Just as with anything else, we all like to believe that our time and our interests are the best, so do community members feel about their online experiences. If they like your site, they'll tell two friends. And so on . . . and so on . . .

Making Community Pay

Community does cost. Content needs to change; you need to monitor chat areas and forums; you need to answer questions. You have to buy the software to make it all run in the first place.

Charging people to join your online community may seem like a good way to generate cash but, unless you have a very good reason, charging people for access can cause your customers to seek out other -- free -- sites. And there are plenty of them.

Consider charging for community use only if members will be discussing confidential information, if your site has adult content, or if yours is a very specialized professional community, such as a site for accountants or insurance professionals, that offers information that would ordinarily be considered of a professional nature. This is the only way to keep transient visitors out and to maintain the integrity of such a community.

Building an Online Community

For any kind of a community, you want to proceed with development as carefully as if you were building an office building or a shopping mall. Unless you lay the foundations properly, your community will crumble beneath its weight.

"Once you head down a given path," says Jim Cashel, "it is very hard to change direction because the community itself has a certain degree of control. It's important to be familiar with the best information and experience with respect to online communities."

Experience dictates that you look first to your audience. Your first step is to evaluate whether your product or topic of interest is sufficiently popular to interest enough people to sustain, or justify the expense of, a community. Even if yours is a very specialized subject or product area, you can still incorporate community into your site by expanding your market by offering additional products or services, or by partnering with an existing site to sponsor a discussion forum or host online chats. Partnering can help you develop a following for your product or service but removes you from the day-to-day management of the community. Some examples are MetLife's involvement with SeniorNet forums, Expedia's  participation in guest chat's at Motley Fool, or Petopia.com's forums hosted by Prospero Technologies' wellengaged.

Think also in terms of emotion. "The best communities," says Martina Boone, "are those that are built around something that a group of people all feel strongly about. Whether your community members are all cancer survivors, lovers of Ireland, or mothers of special needs children, you want to choose community topics that they can rally around and bond within. The medium of the Internet allows people to expose vulnerabilities that they wouldn't necessarily permit anyone to see in person. That can make for an amazing community experience, but you have to plan for it."

Choosing the Features

Planning your community means deciding what features to include. Communication and community are almost synonymous, so some sort of interactivity is almost critical for good community. Brian Rohan, editor-in-chief of Virtual Ireland, points out that visitors to Virtual Ireland "go nuts for anything that enables them to communicate with each other. For this reason, the most popular areas are the penpal listings and the chat room." Rohan tells of a blossoming romance in the penpal area where a gentleman from County Cork met a woman from Philadelphia. The gentleman has come to the States to visit her already, and she's busy planning her trip to Ireland. And they have both written to Virtual Ireland thanking the site for providing the penpals forum.

Other community options include:

• Guest books: A guest book encourages visitors to share with other visitors their thoughts about your site.
   

• Newsletters: An email newsletter containing short articles and site updates is a good way to build community because it shows up in people's inboxes and encourages them to visit your site.
   

• Message boards: Message boards are an important part of many online communities because they allow users to post information, ask questions, and receive advice at their leisure.
   

• Chat: Online chat allows your visitors to connect with each other in real time. However, before you invest in a chat room, you should make sure that your community has enough visitors. If your site has lower traffic numbers, you might consider scheduling chats or question and answer sessions.

No matter what interactive features you choose to include in your site, it's important to provide content in the form of articles and product information whose quality is within your control. Tying content to community is critical, because content also gives your visitors something to discuss in the message boards and online chat forums. The two should never be entirely independent.

Important Considerations

If you decide to create your community from scratch, it's time for some serious number crunching and resource evaluation. Some things to consider are:

• Number of visitors: Accurate traffic estimates are important because not all servers or software packages are set up to handle large amounts of traffic and nothing will ruin your reputation faster than a site that's slow to load or doesn't load at all.
   

• Security: An online community discussing gardenias probably wouldn't need to be password protected or encrypted but if your business caters to the defense industry, you may need to password protect your chat rooms and message boards and encrypt the data.
   

• Interface: The look of your site sets the tone and the navigation elements form the roadmap. Neglect either of these and you'll doom your community before it starts. Rohan recommends being as personable as possible in building your community and keeping any marketing effort very subtle.

The Nuts and Bolts

Even once you know where you are going, you still have to get there. Programming online message boards and chat rooms can be complicated.

• Web hosting services: Several Web sites including Yahoo! and Delphi, offer you the ability to set up free online chats and message boards. The disadvantage of using these is that they can't be customized and they are hosted on the provider's server so you may not get seamless integration with your site. An alternative is fee-based servers, such as Participate.com and Prospero Technologies, formerly Well Engaged, which will design a personalized online community that coordinates with your site design. Fees for fee-based hosting services vary depending upon the features you choose but can cost over $1,000 per month.
   

• Software: There are numerous software packages available that provide message boards, chat capability, and guest books. Software packages range in price from free shareware to $12,000 depending upon what features you choose. One shareware message board package is HyperNews, used by many online communities including iVillage's Parent's Place. One of the advantages of HyperNews is that users are provided with the source code so that they can modify it to integrate with their existing Web site.
   

• Hiring programmers: Hiring a programming team to design or customize your online community is one way of ensuring that you get exactly what you want. Developing a well-conceived customized online community can take from a couple of weeks to many months, and the cost can range from a thousand to many hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the level of sophistication required.

Legal Issues

Lawyers are involved in all aspects of our lives, so it should come as no surprise that creating an online community has legal aspects that you should discuss with your lawyer before your online community goes live. Some of the legal issues are:

• Freedom of speech: Americans are guaranteed Freedom of Speech but there are also rules against slandering and sharing trade secrets. This gets tricky because phone companies are not responsible for what is said over the phone because they don't monitor private phone conversations. However, online companies that do monitor message boards may find a judge deciding they are responsible for what users post.
   

• Access: To protect yourself from discrimination lawsuits, it's a good idea to establish clear cut criteria establishing who gets access to your site and deciding what behavior can get people booted. Set warning mechanisms in place and display all conduct standards and policies prominently.

Support Concerns

Online communities don't run themselves; they require technical support, community managers, and moderators. Good technical support is vital to building community because nothing kills your reputation more than having a site that is constantly down for maintenance or plagued by internal server errors. Like the software itself, technical support can either be provided in-house or outsourced.

Management is something that you can't delegate except to true professionals, but monitoring discussions and maintaining traffic and activity can be handled by volunteers. From AOL to CompuServe, the volunteer model is proven and, the greater the emotional connection between the topic and community members, the easier it will generally be to find someone interested in taking it on as a labor of love or as a self-promotion opportunity.

Promoting Your Community

Building an online community doesn't guarantee that visitors will flock to your site. But you can-- and should -- promote the community that you have built so carefully. Some of the best ways to promote your community have little or no capital outlay requirements.

Be sure to:

• Answer feedback promptly: Customers are your most important resource and they deserve to be answered. Even if customers have a gripe about your site, they'll be impressed and might give you a second chance if you take the time to personally address their complaints.
   

• Cultivate existing customers: Tell your existing customers about your expanded services and give them a special preview invitation.
   

• Write a press release: For businesses with a real world counterpart, a press release sent to your local paper can garner publicity and visitors from within your community. Online press releases are often beneficial too.
   

• Seek online publicity: Free publicity online includes sites and newsletters devoted to promoting new sites and special interest newsletters and sites. About.com and Suite 101 both offer articles and information about hundreds of categories and have thousands of visitors each day. Take the time to find out who's responsible for the Web site or newsletter and email them an announcement of your new community.

Success Stories

Learning from success will put you in a better position from the start of your community planning progject. Success stories abound, but here are a few you'll want to visit:

• iVillage: iVillage caters to women and offers information on a variety of topics ranging from childcare to writing. The site boasts 1,700 individual message boards and hosts 300 real-time chats each week.
   

• Utne Reader: Café Utne is Utne Reader's Internet community that started as a real-world effort to build community among the magazine's readers. Utne Readers' Salon program went online in 1991 and currently has 43,000 registered users. Utne is successful at building community because the company encourages intelligent conversation within a respectful framework.
   

• Virtual Ireland: Although a new site -- opening on St. Patrick's Day 1999 -- Virtual Ireland already has 35,000 registered users and according to Rohan, 62 percent of them return regularly. Virtual Ireland is dedicated to bringing together far-flung emigrants of the Irish community. Some of the features Virtual Ireland includes are chat rooms, newspapers, forums, and news of Ireland.

Keeping Your Community Alive

Virtual communities, like their real-world counterparts, don't exist in a vacuum. And it's important to remember that the community ultimately belongs to your visitors -- not to you. Take the time to participate in your community and get to know your visitors. Rohan said he respects Virtual Ireland's members and trusts them as friends and partners in building the site. He advised people considering building a community "Do as much as possible to give ownership of the site directly to your users -- listen to them."