Congratulation that you have executed your digital community strategy ! In case you are still wandering what's that, you can refer to [Crafting a digital community formation strategy: I] to get started. Now, what should I do to keep the community growing?
Keep maintaining
To ensure there is progress, you need to check against your measurable goals on a frequent basis. Although the metrics are indicators, you will need to ensure that the ongoing added community contents are aligned with the original purpose statement that you have written in your digital community strategy. You can manage the content growth by re-categorizing them , adding high quality ones and retiring stale content. On top of that, you always have to make sure that you manage the user accounts and their related issues. Because change is the only constant, you need to constantly review what are the drivers for your specific community growth and what aren't. The community growth is also dependent on the size of the community so you have to keep marketing to bring in new visitors and keep converting visitors into active contributing members. To keep your active contributing members happy, you have to not only ensure the integrity of the reward system is checked but consider updating the carrots against the competing landscape too.
Increasing the ROI from the community
Once the community is making progress in content generation in terms of volume and quality, then you can consider using that content in the following manner:
- Adding these content as part of the corporate knowledge-based workflow to create/improve products and services
- Publish the content as knowledge based articles for marketing purposes
Recalling the metrics that you have set in the digital community formation strategy, you have review these metrics against the extended metrics of your company goals. For instance, your company has a high volume of incoming calls from customers about the difficult to user internet usage experience using your product and your company has experienced increasing cost of handling increasing customer calls. A successful community will review the ratio of positive suggestions and negative complaints. You should be able to find a positive predictive relationship between increasing customer engagement in that digital community and decreasing number of customer complaints. Community driven sites are 8 times more likely to be revisited and 4 times more likely for members to purchase products or services relative to non digital members. If you have a client relationship management system, you can consider integrating that into your digital community.