Online communities often confuse their users by offering too many features. Here's how to develop a platform with what users really need.
When online marketers consider launching communities, the approach often resembles the "spaghetti against the wall" strategy -- throw every feature against the wall to see what sticks.
These days, off-the-shelf "community in a box" solutions make this approach easy. They provide a basic community structure, and the addition of a feature is often as simple as ticking a box on an admin control panel somewhere. Marketers are thus tempted to enable every feature under the sun, from user blogs, to private messaging, to product ratings.
This sometimes leads to users who are overwhelmed by choice when it's time to share their thoughts with the rest of the community. Do they post to a blog? Start a thread on a message board? Post to an email discussion list?
Do you see the problem? Many of these community features can be redundant, and that doesn't give the user a clear usability path.
Ideally, a marketer would do what they can to let a community shape its own feature set. Over the years, one of my favorite message boards has opened up threads to debate the merits of adding features, from image posting to the ability to self-edit one's posts. And its members have appreciated those debates greatly.
Even if you're not comfortable letting your community make its own judgments regarding features, you should perform a formal assessment to determine which features are most appropriate. You may find that a message board community might not want or need the ability to create groups, since they might be perfectly happy creating new threads or forums to address niche interests. An assessment might cover feature redundancy, and it might also provide an evaluation of how you want communication to flow.
In other words, a message board does a pretty good job of keeping popular threads and posts in a centralized location and archiving them for future use. A popular thread on an email discussion list, if it isn't archived on the web somewhere, disappears forever once a user deletes it.
If your community frequently revisits old ideas or needs to build off of topics that have already been discussed, an email list might not be a great feature choice.
A great example of fitting features to needs comes from industry luminary Peter Shankman. Months ago, he created a Facebook group called "If I Can Help a Reporter Out…" that linked journalists with subject matter experts and sources for stories. As the group grew, Peter realized that he was up against Facebook's hard limit of 1,200 emails at a time to group members, so he moved the group to an email list. Now it's known as Help A Reporter Out (or HARO for short), and members receive two emails a day with requests for sources. That's it -- the very essence of simplicity.
What does Peter miss about Facebook and its various bells and whistles?
"I miss nothing," he said, "because I created a fan page on Facebook, allowing those who want to interact with me on Facebook to still do so. At the core, I have an email list, nothing more -- all the bells and whistles are just distractions from the content. I'm fine with it just being that.”
HARO continues to grow at a steady clip and boasts 16,000 members as of this writing. I'd wager that the growth is at least partly attributable to Peter's smart assessment of the needs of his community. Notice that all he provided was a way for a handful of reporters to let a large group of qualified people know who they were looking to interview for stories.
An email list fulfills that need quite nicely. And Peter didn't confuse people by adding community profiles, private messaging or blogs. That would have distracted people from HARO's core mission.
It doesn't seem to bother Peter that he moved from Web 2.0 to Web 1.0 technologies in growing his group. And it shouldn’t. He smartly assessed the best tools at hand to get the job done, and he's now reaping the rewards.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.