Ten Rules for Building an Online B2B Community

I had the honor of being on the “smaller publishers” panel discussing social networking at the ABM Spring Meeting in Naples, FL earlier this week. It was a great session with excellent questions and a great group of panelists. One of my fellow panelists was Steve MacMinn, CTO of Globalspec, an internet-based information company focused on engineering and industrial markets. Back in April 2005, they launched their version of a social network called CR4 (which stands for Conference Room 4, BTW). I enjoyed being on the panel with Steve as it was very obvious he knew what he was doing and had experience running an online community. During the discussion, he shared “Ten Rules for Building an Online B2B Community.” I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but overall, these are excellent guiding points:

1. Content is King.  If your site feels “dead,” with little content that doesn’t change very often, people aren’t going to return.  This means that in the beginning, before you have a critical mass of members, you’ll have to generate content yourself.

2. Answer Their Questions.  A corollary to “Content is King” is that if members are using your site to ask questions, and those questions don’t get answered, they won’t come back.  You need to make sure that members’ questions get answered.  In the beginning, this usually means doing some research and answering them yourself.  Also, as part of “Invite them Back” (below), notify the user when someone has posted a comment in response to their question.  Don’t make them have to remember to come back and check.

3. Start With Just a Few Topics.  In the beginning, your site will be struggling to build content.  While it’s tempting to fill out the entire topical structure of your site, the result will be a site that looks big but is mostly empty.  If you start with just a few topics, you can concentrate on building content in those areas and your site will feel more full and active.  As content builds, you can split out content areas as appropriate.

4. Moderate.  If you just build the shell and put it out there, your community will quickly fill up with spam posts.  Even without spam, it doesn’t take long for some discussions to run off the rails and become filled with political rants, name calling, or insults.  You need to actively moderate the content, and the behavior of members.  Setting the proper tone will allow your users to understand what is off limits and feel more comfortable about using the site.  Provide a way for users to report bad posts and they’ll self-police pretty well.  Eventually, you may be able to allow trusted users to help with moderation.

5. Don’t Squash What You Don’t Like.  Since you control the site, it’s tempting to censor users’ contributions if they go in a direction that you don’t like (e.g, criticizing your business or criticizing your customers).  Avoid the temptation.  Once your users catch on to the fact that only one point of view is permitted on certain topics, you’ll lose their trust.  If that happens you may as well turn the server off.  Instead, find a way to direct the conversation in a more positive direction.

6. Don’t Restrict Via Registration.  Many people need to participate a little before they feel comfortable registering on a community site.  Allow anonymous posts.  It adds content and value to your site and doesn’t cost you anything.  Many of those anonymous posters and readers later register and become active members of the community.

(ERIC’S COMMENTS: I agree with letting annonymous readers read your forum, but I don’t personally agree with anonymous posting. Way too much spam gets through that way. However, DO keep your registration questions as minimal as possible.)

7. Invite Them Back.    If you want your community members to come back often, you have to remind them.  On CR4, when a user posts a story or a comment, they are automatically subscribed to that thread and are notified by email whenever a new comment is posted.  Take it from me, it’s addictive.  When you get that email, you just have to go see what someone said about your post or comment.  You’re often motivated to reply and the cycle starts over again.  CR4 also has an opt-in “Daily Digest” of all the day’s top stories, which is sent out to all registered users (which gives users an incentive to register).  This makes for a very high repeat visitor rate.

8. Keep Your Distance From the Core.  While it’s OK to promote your business somewhat to your community, avoid over-commercializing.  Squash the temptation to “market” to your community members.  Members visit the community to interact with each other and de-stress a bit.  If they suspect that your community is just a method for harvesting their names and contact information, they’ll abandon you pretty quickly. 

9. Publicize.  Build your community site from the beginning for SEO.  Create an RSS feed and get it out to the RSS syndication sites.  Contact popular bloggers in your domain and invite them to visit and write about your site.  Offer link trades with other bloggers in your space.  Communicate with your core user base to let them know that it’s out there.  Tie it in to your newsletters or other communications to your user base. 

10. Don’t Expect a Windfall.  In a B2B environment, big revenue from your community site is unlikely.  While there are opportunities to monetize the online community, and you should certainly take advantage of them, your audience will likely be too small to generate large advertising revenues.  The best objective in building a community is to give your users someplace to be, even when they’re not conducting business with your main site.  That way, they’ll remember who you are and visit you often.  Your benefits will come because your community members will be better and more frequent users of your main business.  At GlobalSpec we found that our CR4 members perform better than non-members at many key metrics on our core web site.

(ERIC’S COMMENTS: This is one area where Steve and I also disagree a bit. I do believe that forums and other social networking initiatives can be highly profitable even out of the gate and grow your business both directly and indirectly. Although Steve is correct that if you’re starting from scratch, it will take a while for the community to get large enough to generate the really big bucks.)