I have worked with many companies to build out online communities and people always seem to ask me what makes a great community and how do you build one?

What Makes a Great Community? That one is easy – the people engaging with it and the people who support it.

How Do You Build a Stellar Online Community? Well, that one deserves a bit more detail.

So I started going back to my ready resources and articles and thought that I would compile a list of best practices across a bunch of blog posts and forums that I will list below. This list is compiled and my view of what it takes to build a stellar online community. I include the referenced links so you can review and make your own list. Let’s get started:

1. Create compelling content on a recurring basis. Brands sometimes create videos, podcasts, or stories on a daily or weekly basis that encourages members to come back. – From Jeremiah Owyang
2. Integrate with your website –and other customer touchpoints. Remember, corporate sites of the future are aggregations of community discussion, be sure to integrate community in your corporate site.  Make sure your call center, email marketing, and external newsletters all integrate community.  (don’t forget even the email signatures) - From Jeremiah Owyang
3. Invite community influencers and advocates to the community first –giving them first right of testing the system and then inviting others.- From Jeremiah Owyang
4. Encourage interaction through conversations. Ask questions, talk about controversial topics, or host a contest that encourages participation.- From Jeremiah Owyang
5. Reward top contributors: Those that participate the most, or perhaps, are the most helpful should be recognized on a leader board, and thanked in public.  Unexpectedly, send them something nice as a thank you, or reward them with premium services –never money.- From Jeremiah Owyang
6. Reward users who fill out their profile. Folks like to see other friendly faces, so giving them access to premium features or recognition of those who have the most complete profiles should recognized.- From Jeremiah Owyang
7. Centralize your community around your real world events.  People want to find each other before events, talk about the event during the duration, and then afterwards are key.  Use the community in your physical events. - From Jeremiah Owyang
8. Virtual Events integrate community:  Don’t just use on your real world events, but integrated with your virtual ones, I‘ve written at length about that here. - From Jeremiah Owyang
9. Empower your power users – give them a private area in the forum & let them brainstorm. You’ll be amazed at what a group will come up with! Encourage them to keep it simple so no one gets worn out. Have them help moderate. - From Connie Bensen
10. Encourage employees to get active.  A party isn’t much fun if there’s no one there, so encourage the hosts (often employees) to kickstart discussions by talking, debating, and arguing about the news, updates, or even relevant YouTube videos will trigger discussion.  Of course, you have a community manager on staff, right? - From Jeremiah Owyang
11. Encourage people to come out of lurking – run games or contests to see who is frequenting your forum. You may be surprised! (where to get the prizes? If you don’t have resources, partner with related products & ask them to donate. You’ll be surprised at how many will join your venture.) - From Connie Bensen
12. Encourage members to put info in their signature (for ex: a photography site – they could include their camera, lens info & software (It will encourage conversations amongst members) - From Connie Bensen
13. Listen to your customers. Ask them what they’d like to see in the forums. Post a poll of interest to your community. Ask them to provide feedback on your product/resources - From Connie Bensen
14. Ask yourself what makes your site unique? or how would you like it to be unique? How are you providing the user with value. - From Connie Bensen
15. Be present – as a site owner it’s important that you’re there & active. Get to know your people & they will notice & respond. Make your customers feel special. - From Connie Bensen
16. Be flexible…. and realize that sometimes you’ll have a great idea & oopsie, things don’t go as planned. But try try again. - From Connie Bensen
17. Be creative… watch what others are doing & gather ideas. I’m a people watcher, can you tell? And I love trying to figure out why things are successful. Plan ahead – this will guarantee success – and make you happier when you’re more relaxed in the execution of your plans. - From Connie Bensen
18. Be transparent – say what you mean & mean what you say. You’ll gain far more respect with all those you work with. And this is obvious, but good business practices are absolutely necessary. Remedy customer service issues quickly & follow up. Even the most negative curmudgeons will post their appreciation which adds value to your forums because it shows that your company is listening to their customers & most importantly *cares*. - From Connie Bensen

Great Resources Mentioned Above a Few Extra Golden Nuggets:

How to Kick Start a Community – Jeremiah Owyang

How to Kick Start a Community – Connie Bensen

Facebook Community Manager Group

Friendfeed Community Management Room

Twitter Pack of Social Media and Community Management People

Launch Your Community Site with a Bang – ShoutEm

10 Ways to Kick Start a User Community – Keen View

Leave a comment below: Whew, I’ve rattled off my best, now over to you.  Leave a comment with your tip.  How do you kick start a community?

I wanted to take the opportunity to thank Shashi Bellamkonda, our Social Media Swami, and the man responsible for launching this social media “road trip” and evangelizing both internally and externally to people growing it into the award-winning social media destination for small businesses on the Internet.

In typical TV Show fashion we are going to take a look at the last 500 posts and highlight all those who have contributed in our version of “flashbacks” while sparing you from the cheesy music and soft camera lense fades. We will then look forward about our refined mission, our expanding team and what you should expect from us for the next 500 posts.

So let’s turn on the way back machine and begin….

Best of Shashi Bellamkonda – “The Swami”

Who doesn’t know the Swami? Or in the case of the picture to the left, the Cowboy. He got that hat at SXSW and he now has two names. He has been the driving force with helping Network Solutions dive into the social media pool. Under his leadership we have grown into a family of blogs covering numerous small business related topics. Our presence on twitter as @netsolcares has helped transform our reputation management program so much that he won the 2008 Excellence in New Communications Award.

Here are some of his best posts from the last year:

10 Reasons to Use Facebook for Business

How Small Businesses Can Use Social Media

How I became a Social Media Swami at Network Solutions

Aesops Fables and Corporate Blogs

A Hard Sell? Social Media and Your Boss – Part 2 Becoming an Expert

Best of Connie Bensen – “Queen of Community”

Connie joined the team in July as the first community manager and wrote tons of great stuff until her departure in October. She has moved on to work with other companies to help build their communities. Her presence is missed but we still have her awesome content.

Here are a few of her greatest hits:

Building Your Business Online Series (6 Parts)

Building Your Brand Series (5 Parts)

10 Reasons to Choose Network Solutions to Register Your Domain Name

Use Social Networking to Grow Your Small Business

Does Your Business Need a Community?

Best of Steve Fisher – “Part Pinky, Part Brain”

I joined the team back in June as a writer to add content to this growing blog. Prior to that I was writing VentureFiles for about four years which focused on small business and raising funding from the entrepreneur’s perspective.

In November I “leveled up” and became the Social Media and Community Manager under the guidance and mentorship of “The Swami”. Over that time we have increased the size of our team, launched new blogs, brought in tons of guest contributors and done Social Media training courses for groups here at Network Solutions. I have had some great experiences meeting extremely talented small business owners and have had the opportunity to interview many great entrepreneurs. Most are customers of Network Solutions and it is always great to reach out to those who might become customers in the future.

Here are my favorite posts over the last year:

The Business Plan Series (15 Parts)

The Marketing Plan Series (15 Parts)

Rules for Entrepreneurs – Rule #1: Make Sure Your Business Card Doesn’t Get Thrown Out

Getting Productive in 2009 – Spending a Year with GTD

Thoughts on Coworking: What is it and is it for you?

Best of Jill Foster – “Our Most Passionate Blogger”

Not to be confused with the character on Young and the Restless, Jill signed on in November to contribute as a writer to Solutions Are Power and a few months ago we launched a new blog in our growing family of blogs. This blog focused on Women Entrepreneurs Growing their Businesses is appropriately called Women Grow Business. She has written awesome content on both Solutions Are Power and Women Grow Business.

Here is some her best stuff from Solutions Are Power:

Web 2.0 in mostly plain English: a workshop take down

Obama’s White House: forecasts & challenges for digital America

Ego surfs and action plans: your roadmap to transparency

Best of Joe Loong – “King of the Subject Line”

Joe knows how to write a catchy subject line. So much that most of his posts stay in the top read posts. You might call that search engine bait but we call it good content. Joe joined around the same time as Jill and has written some really informative and timely stories as well as providing great coverage of our local events.

Here are a few of his golden “SEO bait” posts:

Fake Your Way to Being a Social Media Expert: Strategies for Keeping Up

Stupid Link Tricks: A Daisy Chain of URL Shorteners

5 Stories of Twittering Gone Bad

Using Bacon and Social Media to Promote Your Business

How to Write Catchy, Clicky Blog Headlines

Looking to the Future

As we begin our journey writing our next 500 posts, we have two new bloggers that will be gracing our pages in the next week. They are Ken Yeung and Michael Dougherty.

Ken Yeung – “Mr. Everywhere”

Ken is someone I have known for about three years and while he was here in DC he was always the guy with a camera taking really awesome photos that showed up on his Flickr feed. I saw him at almost every event and I called him “Mr. Everywhere”. Now that he is living in San Francisco, I consider him our new West Coast blogger and correspondent. Most importantly he is a great writer and brings a new perspective along with new topics that this blog has been looking to expand into for a while.

He has a great marketing background and will be writing about online marketing, and because he is on the west coast, covering events in that region to expand beyond the many DC events you have read about.

Michael Dougherty – “Wicked Java”

Mike AKA “WickedJava” is a long time entrepreneur, marketing expert and social media guru. He has worked on the marketing agency side as well as in corporate marketing departments for large and small firms. His perspective for small business owners on navigating the online and offline worlds of branding, print, web design and social media has been a missing element here and one frequently requested by readers.

In his other life, Mike is also a budding film Director and accomplished screenwriter. In the interest of full disclosure, we are both co-founders of a non-profit film production company called Big Damn Fan Films that is about to begin principal photography on Browncoats:Redemption, a project that is based on the Firefly/Serenity universe created by Joss Whedon. The project will raise money for five select charities and will be released in Fall of 2010.

Our experiences using Social Media and Marketing might be a topic of discussion once in a while but only in the interest of lessons learned that we can pass on to our small business/future entrepreneur readership.

We are excited to have these two new team members on board and the future is looking extremely bright.

The Future Looks Bright

Thanks for coming to the blog, being a regular reader and growing with us. If you found us for the first time with this post, please subscribe because we are only getting started. We are committed to bringing you relevant, informative and CCC content we hope helps you grow your business. We are partners with you in this journey and if there is any topic you want to hear about, please let us know in the comments.

See you at post #1000…

You will remember that at Blog World 2008, Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Media Swami & me, Steve Fisher, headed to Las Vegas for BlogWorld Expo. I am meeting them there & we will be covering the event that features THE best in the blogging world.

The 2008 BlogWorld & New Media Expo was “The first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media.” It is the largest blogging conference in the world with more than 50 seminars, panel discussions & keynotes.

Well known speakers included: Stephanie Agresta, Chris Brogan, David Berkowitz, Rohit Bhargava, Michael Brito, Toby Bloomberg, Paul Chaney, Frank Eliason of ComCastCares, Jason Falls, Tim Ferriss, Laura Fitton, Shama Hyder, Tris Hussey, Guy Kawasaki, Lee LeFever, Becky McCray, Jake McKee, Lionel Menchaca, Scott Monty, Hugh McLeod, Jeremy Pepper, Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, Brian Solis, Liz Strauss, Mario Sundar, Robyn Tippins, Kristie Wells … and the list goes on!

I met Darren Rowse, ProBlogger from Australia & Nicole Simon who came in from Germany. And..Patrick O’Keefe the author of “Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards” was also there.

We are looking forward to this 2009 event to be bigger and better now that they are together.

How to Implement Social Media Strategies for Big Business
This panel features three community managers sharing their experiences implementing social media technologies in large corporate environments.

Moderator: Matt Warburton, Director, Community Management, Yahoo!
Connie Bensen, Community Manager, Network Solutions
LaSandra Brill, Manager, Web & Social Media Marketing, Cisco
Michael Brito, Social Media Strategist, Intel

As I was thinking about the accomplishments of the Social Media Team at Network Solutions I realized that the story can be told thru blog posts.

1. The realization of the potential for using social media was promoted by:

Raj Malik, Lawyer at Network Solutions

2. The challenges are outlined by Livingston Communications:

On the Buzz Bin

3. I outlined the role I serve

On my blog

4.The Social Media Team utilizes @netsolcares on Twitter

Twitter for Customer Service

Another Twitter Success Story

Gerry Rosso – Voice of @netsolcares

5. Our efforts are acknowledged for ‘Listening’

Finalist for SNCR Award

6. I joined in the volunteer hurricane preparations & Network Solutions comp’ed hosting services

Hurricane Wiki – philanthropy

7. A 10 year old used our software to raise money for children less fortunate than himself

Encouraging User Generated Content

8. I lead a social media campaign in supporting that 10 yr old’s vision & helping him attain the matching funds offered by Network Solutions

9. Other efforts for providing for customers of Network Solutions:

Video series for putting your business online (very popular – viral?)

10. Supporting a Community for Small Businesses

mysolutionspot.com

11. Open Innovation at Network Solutions

ideasarepower.com

12. Creating a Network for Developers

LinkTogether

I blog about community building strategies at conniebensen.com. I am recognized as a leader in community management. I enjoy providing resources, mentorship & connecting with the thought leaders in social media, PR & marketing. I also blog at Marketing 2.0. I recently served as Community Manager for ACDSee products. My sister & I established a vibrant community at DigiScrapInfo.com for crafting enthusiasts. My philosophy is to provide resources & the best customer service possible. Before working online I spent a decade building community in a public library setting. I work remotely from my home in Minnesota & truly enjoy the opportunities & challenges that Web 2.0 offers!

I’m excited to be joining forces with Shashi! Last fall he connected with me when he was determined that Network Solutions needed a community manager. Since then he has taken on the role as Social Media Swami. I look forward to working with his enthusiasm & leadership..

Thanks to Shel Israel for his kind words!