Building an Online Communities Strategy From Scratch

Building an online community in 1999 means picking from a strange, uneven set of tools. Usenet newsgroups still carry serious traffic and real expertise, but they’re unmoderated and easy to ruin with spam. Yahoo! just launched Yahoo! Clubs, giving any group a free message board and file space. GeoCities, which Yahoo bought for $3.6 billion back in January, hosts millions of personal pages organized into themed “neighborhoods.” Delphi Forums and The WELL run more structured discussion boards. None of these is obviously the right choice, so the first step is matching the tool to your audience rather than picking whatever is easiest to set up.

Step 1: Decide what the community is for

A community built to sell something dies fast. The ones that last, the WELL is the clearest example, exist because members get real value from each other before any business shows up. Before you touch software, write down the specific problem your community solves for members that they can’t easily solve alone. If you can’t answer that in one sentence, you’re not ready to launch.

Step 2: Pick a platform that matches your audience’s habits

If your audience already lives on Usenet, don’t drag them to a new walled garden, participate in the existing newsgroup and earn credibility first. If you’re starting from zero, a hosted board through Yahoo! Clubs or Delphi Forums gets you running in a day with no server to manage. A mailing list run through a listserv is often the better fit for a professional audience that checks email daily but won’t remember to visit a website.

Step 3: Seed the conversation before you invite anyone

An empty message board kills momentum instantly. Recruit five to ten people you already know, ask them to post real questions and answers and get a week of genuine activity going before you announce the community publicly. New visitors judge a community by its most recent posts, not its potential.

Step 4: Set light rules and enforce them personally

Usenet has taught the whole internet what happens without moderation: flame wars, spam and threads that drive away anyone new. You don’t need a long list of rules, you need one visible person willing to step in when a thread turns hostile and welcome newcomers by name when they post for the first time.

Step 5: Give members a reason to return next week

Communities that survive give people a reason to check back regularly: a weekly digest email, a recurring discussion thread or simply a habit of the organizer replying to every new post within a day. iVillage, which went public on the Nasdaq in March, built its entire audience around exactly this kind of return visit, women coming back for advice on parenting and health topics they trusted more than a magazine.

Step 6: Track who’s engaged, not just who signed up

Membership counts look good in a pitch but tell you nothing about health. Watch how many people post more than once, how many threads get real replies and how long it takes a new question to get an answer. A community of 200 active regulars beats one of 5,000 names who never came back.

What this costs you

Almost nothing in cash and a real amount of time. The tools are free or nearly free. The scarce resource is a person willing to show up daily for months before the community can run itself. That’s the actual cost of building an online community, and it’s the reason most attempts stall within a few weeks of launch.

Start with one clear purpose, one platform that fits your audience and one person committed to showing up. Everything else, growth, structure, even revenue, follows from getting those three things right first.