Posted by jyoung-gdo on October 3, 2006 at 4:46am
My company is looking to start a community site for our customers and I am in charge of making sure we have the right resources assigned to maintaining the content and driving the conversation. I expect the site will be used to discuss the use of our products and non-profit best practices. Do you know of any data resources that will tell me what kind of time commitment will be necessary for moderation/driving conversation?
Comments
It absolutely depends on
It absolutely depends on what the goals are. Maybe you can elaborate on that?
We want to provide a
We want to provide a community for customers to self support each other as a first line of product support. We also want to drive conversation about best practices and learn from those conversations. We also want to use the community as aplatform to get out messages every once in a while.
The key to remember
The key to remember is that your customers are the ones who will "drive conversation" -- you can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink. By enabling and encouraging their easy and useful participation, you can nurture the community into being.
You'll probably want to consider a lot of time front-loading your own workflow. Build a knowledge base. Seed forums with essential info and links. Make it easy for people to post questions. Make it easy for people to find answers.
Once you're up and running, with active community participation, then your role will shift more towards offering expert answers and general policing of the site (dealing with trolls and spammers, for example).
That's my feeling, on the little info you've shared. Does it seem to make sense?
Laura
pingVision, LLC
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development
I think that creating a
I think that creating a forum where product support questions get asked can be a great idea, but I would say that it's tough to get people to support each other from my experience. Initially, you probably want as much internal resources available as you would need to support as many customers as you project to use it. Of course, that would depend on how much support customers typically need.
Incidentally, this sort of thing is usually done as a forum. Are you thinking of something more robust than that?