Whilst I’m still mulling over the panel discussion I moderated at the AltSearchEngines Get Together (I’ll post about that next week, but in the meantime David Hardtke over at Surf Canyon blogged about it yesterday), I’m at Web 2.0 Expo and thought you may be interested in my notes from some of the presentations that I’ve attended. The first in my Web 2.0 series is a panel titled: “Community Building: Good, Bad and Ugly”.

Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Apr 22 - 25, 2008

Meet the panelists:

Dawn Foster (Community Manager Jive Software)
Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research)
Bob Duffy (Community Strategist at Intel for OpenPort)
Kellie Parker (Community Manager PC World & MacWorld)

Here’s what the session covered:

Online communities are being created for almost every group of people imaginable (technical and non-technical). However, it’s not a simple case of build it and they will come. Passionate communities entail considerable forethought, attention to technology, and a dose of know-how to manage the unruly.

Hear more about:
1) Techniques for building strong and productive communities.
2) Ideas for resolving community issues and getting the community back on track.
3) What to do when a community or a few community members seem beyond hope (the dark side of the force).

My score: *** of 5.

And here are my notes covering the speakers’ reflections:

The definition of Community:

- Very simple - People with common interests interacting with each other online

Why is community important?

- Getting feedback on products, services
- Building brand loyalty through two-way communication
- Not just Company-to-Customer communication

Important things to consider when creating a community:

- Build versus join
- Train your bloggers
- Key is the people, not the companies
- Company (hosting the community) is like a landlord and the critical skill set of a community manager: Passion about being part of the dialogue, be a good networker and be diplomatic.

Some challenges in building communities:

Driving traffic:
- Find the passionate people.
- Get the word out through blogs and podcasts.
- Keep in mind the goals, i.e. is it to achieve a certain goal like get someone register.
- As a community manager always be polite – appreciate any feedback.

Some tips:
- Do not over-engage with the community
- Engage them when they arrive with general ease-in questions
- Growth Momentum is in ‘external’ (customer-to-customer) and semi-private communities

Measuring the success of communities – metrics:
- Measure against a goal and objectives
- Referral links from other sites
- Increased logins from existing, number of new registrations
- Number of messages posted
- Not necessarily number of leads as an outcome but awareness building
- Number of comments being posted on topics

What’s the future of communities:

- Sharing across communities and community destinations
- For companies the number of static pages versus community driven pages will shift significantly towards community generated content
- Data portability

Next in the Web 2.0 series is my notes on Data Portability, Privacy and the Emergence of the Social Web, a session I gave ***** of 5.