Last month from May 12 to 15, Shannon and I attended the Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas. We made a lot of really valuable connections and gained new insights into community building, launch, and management. However, we weren’t able to really debrief and share our takeaways until much later, as the new MyCancerHub launched the following Tuesday, May 20 (which we’ll cover in a new post later this week).
After sharing our knowledge and thoughts on the workshops, presentations, discussions, and networking, here is the first of our biggest takeaways:
Define Your Goals and Needs Before Selecting Your Technology
This may seem obvious to some, but when juggling a lot of different projects and roles, simple rules like this are easy to forget for community managers and owners. It’s easy to think that you need blogs, discussions, tags, groups, friends, wikis, etc. for any community to benchmark against the latest social networking technologies. The presence of these features may be a make-or-break when selecting a vendor. However, the technology features that are necessary depend on the type of your community (market research, support, entertainment, or customer service) and your audience.
For example, blogs might not make sense for a customer service type of community, and wikis might not make sense for a medical support community, where reliable information is very sensitive and necessary. However, the key to developing a community is not think about thing in terms of selecting or developing features. Instead, think about how to most effectively enable people to express themselves, and share knowledge and experience with each other.
At the conference, we noticed a few companies that were applying this lesson to their business model. Amir Kishon, the CEO of Wellness Layers, develops health-related communities for clients, and customizes every layout, feature, and widget to each customer’s need, which is a unique direction that seems suitable for a low-volume distribution to more high-profile companies. We’re hoping that there is some potential for Wellness Layers to partner with and develop a few tools for OptumHealth’s up-and-coming MyOptumHealth.com website.
How Did We Select Our Technology?
To elaborate on our experience, Shannon had to pick a community vendor (Jive Software’s Clearspace Community) before defining the goals and needs of our community. However, I can’t see how this could have been done any other way since we are looking to develop multiple communities of many types and for many audiences over the next few years. Each community will be vastly different, so the choice to go with JIve was based on how versatile and comprehensive their technology was, along with how quickly their product is evolving.
We’ll have to see how our experience with Clearspace Community holds up as we develop and launch new communities, but with its high emphasis on flexibility and lots of new features on the way in July, we’re optimistic that we made a good choice.
Tags: Clearspace Community, Community 2.0, Community Planning, Community Technology, Jive Software, MyOptumHealth, Wellness Layers
