How Do you Successfully Build an Online Community

• Give visitors a voice – allow visitors to comment and share their thoughts and feelings on products and services.
• Connectivity – allow members of your community to connect with one another. Let them build a network within your community (i.e. add a friend, connect with a colleague)
• Keep it real – be transparent and keep it authentic. Never artificially inject sales and marketing copy into a comment or Forum. It’s okay to have corporate messaging on your site it just has to be in context.

Here are just a few features to begin building an online community:

• Relevant content – ultimately visitors are going to join a network if you have relevant and useful content and tools. Of course you don’t have to be responsible for creating all the content, over time, members of your community can begin giving back to the community in the form of written content, imagery and videos
• User rated content – this includes tools
• Forums – allowing visitors to share and exchange ideas through a forum on your web site.
• Messaging – instant messaging, on site e-mail
• Custom profiles – allow members of your community to add photos, a biography and credentials.

Case Studies

At Tidal we’ve create a number of large successful communities for clients like:

• Sutton Real Estate – this community is made up of over 9,500 realtors. The site received over 190,000 visits in November with 60% of members logging in on a daily basis. This is a highly engaged community.
• United Way – 97.5% of members logged into the site and participated in a meaningful way within the first 30 days of launch.
• Aviva – secure, stable and robust. We created an online community called the Aviva broker extranet which supports 55,000 users.