I had a a insightful discussion with Michael Wilson, co founder and CEO of Small World Labs. Founded in 2005, they are a 15+ people company based in Austin, Texas. Small World Labs provides a hosted solution for online social networks and communities. They currently have about 45+ customers including KVIE (PBS radio station), Save the Children, Bootstrap Network , Dallas Morning News  SportsGist. They price their offering based on the number of page views the community generates monthly, plus an initial setup fee.

Michael's parents are both deaf, but their lives changed with the advent of Internet communities by allowing them to communicate and interact in a way unimaginable before, which was the seed of inspiration for Michael. They have the vision of allowing companies, customers break down the barriers to communicate with each other and enrich lives.

He clearly sees the market for online communities moving away from the early adopters to the early majority, driven by "The Myspace effect", which we have written about before. Companies large and small having seen the sheer numbers and size of Myspace and the cult-like following are actively looking at their own constituents to see how they can foster discussions and conversations to their benefit.

Here are the top 3 best practices he is recommending on the path to success with social communities:

1. Align all user incentives (loyalty plan) towards goals for the community. He advocates writing down clear objectives for the community e.g.:

a) # of page views you wish to see annually / monthly / weekly - this assumes you care about page views - which in a lot of cases translates to CPM (based on an ad driven model)

 
b) # of users you want to join as active participants in the community.

c) User facilitated interactions. There was a good piece on "Conversation Index" by Don Dodge, which discusses this in more detail. How to track that you are having a conversation with customers instead of talking at them?

2. Dedicate resources and align their incentives towards the community goals. E.g. If my bread is buttered (as a Marketing person) on number of leads generated, and the community "project" is a night job, the misalignment is obvious. Instead, ensure that the marketing person gets bonus paid on achieving the community goals.

3. Measure the metrics that matter. Most social networks measure tangible metrics, but not those that actually contribute to the growth of the community or its vibrancy. If you have support community, maybe the metric that matters is more how quickly can users get the information you need, instead of page views, which might tell you something, but nothing useful or actionable.

There was an extremely compelling discussion I had with him on the Communities being "Community Centric" vs. "User centric" - which is about building a community for the sake of building it, versus driving the community to build it. More on that later.