Field of Dreams

If you build it, they will come. A state­ment ingrained in America’s psy­che thanks to the 1989 film Field of Dreams. But while the film gar­nered numer­ous awards and acco­lades from crit­ics and movie­go­ers alike (three Oscar nom­i­na­tions alone, Best Pic­ture, Best Music, Best Writ­ing), not even Kevin Cost­ner can save your social net­work­ing site from fad­ing into obscu­rity with­out the right stuff.

If you build it they will come works well for build­ing base­ball dia­monds in Iowa corn­fields, but when it comes to social net­work­ing sites, it takes a con­certed effort of seed­ing, pro­mot­ing, and man­ag­ing to get things off the ground.

I’ve been scour­ing the web for other authors and orga­ni­za­tions who have addressed steps to build­ing suc­cess­ful online com­mu­ni­ties. Aside from a hand­ful of per­sonal blogs dis­cussing this issue, there isn’t a whole lot of offi­cial research on what fac­tors are nec­es­sary for suc­cess­ful social networks.

I did, how­ever, find an excel­lent resource from the Kick­Apps team. Kick­apps recently pub­lished a whitepa­per titled “Nine Steps to a Suc­cess­ful Online Com­mu­nity.” They’ve put together a list of guide­lines to help social net­works reach their fullest poten­tial. The nine steps nec­es­sary to pro­mote good plan­ning and best practices?

  1. Define your community’s pur­pose and audience.
  2. Get a Com­mu­nity Manager.
  3. Choose the tech­nol­ogy that’s right for you.
  4. Seed your com­mu­nity with great content.
  5. Cus­tomize your community’s look and feel.
  6. Pro­mote it!
  7. Encour­age active participation.
  8. Man­ager your com­mu­nity with fair-mind consistency.
  9. Lis­ten and optimize.

I’ll be writ­ing about each one of these in sep­a­rate blogs in the next few weeks. In the mean­time, read up for your­self here and also check out some of these links.

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