Michael’s parents are both deaf, but their lives changed with the advent of
Internet communities by allowing them to communicate and interact in a way
unimaginable before, which was the seed of inspiration for Michael. They have
the vision of allowing companies, customers break down the barriers to
communicate with each other and enrich lives.

He clearly sees the market for online communities moving away from the early
adopters to the early majority, driven by “The Myspace
effect”, which we have written
about before. Companies large and small having seen the sheer numbers and
size of Myspace and the cult-like following are actively looking at their own
constituents to see how they can foster discussions and conversations to their
benefit.

Here are the top 3 best practices he is recommending on the path to success
with social communities:

1. Align all user incentives (loyalty plan) towards goals for the community.
He advocates writing down clear objectives for the community e.g.:

a) # of
page views you wish to see annually / monthly / weekly – this assumes you care
about page views – which in a lot of cases translates to CPM (based on an ad
driven model)

 
b) # of
users you want to join as active participants in the community.

c) User facilitated interactions. There was a good piece on “Conversation
Index” by Don Dodge, which discusses this in more detail. How to track
that you are having a conversation with customers instead of talking at them?

2. Dedicate
resources and align their incentives towards the community goals. E.g. If
my bread is buttered (as a Marketing person) on number of leads generated, and
the community “project” is a night job, the misalignment is obvious.
Instead, ensure that the marketing person gets bonus paid on achieving the
community goals.

3. Measure the metrics that matter. Most social networks measure
tangible metrics, but not those that actually contribute to the growth of the
community or its vibrancy. If you have support community, maybe the metric that matters is more how quickly can users get the
information you need, instead of page views, which might tell you something,
but nothing useful or actionable.

There was an extremely compelling discussion I had with him on the Communities
being “Community Centric” vs. “User centric” – which is
about building a community for the sake of building it, versus driving the
community to build it. More on that later.