On the ZDNet blog a list of the twelve best practices for online customer communities is given. Where the organization of, or the participation in, an online customer community can be seen as the next step in marketing. No longer the marketing department pushes it’s message to (potential) customers, but these individuals themselves come together and interact online about a set of products and services or a brand. These types of communities often originate on the initiative of passionate consumers. I want to stress the second point (Community is mostly not a technology problem) that is made in the blogpost. This is relevant when an organization organizes its own community. The writer states: “it’s safe to say that the biggest challenges you will have will be around the business challenges and social architecture of your customer community and not the technology”. I could not agree more with this point, especially since a lot of community managers seem to focus too much on the technological aspects. They implement a lot of nice features and think that activity and participation will follow automatically. I would definetly suggest to focus more on the social aspects of online communities.The other eleven points are well worth a read as well. So I would suggest to take a look at the blogpost.
