In a show of hands at the start of the conference, Francois asked the audience how many people had communities already and how many were starting one. The result was - 50% - split down the middle. Interesting.

Throughout the sessions I heard several folks looking for answers from the speakers and the experts. Since I had several discussions around this topic, I thought I would share our ten point check list - I am not saying this is meant to be comprehensive - just what’s worked for us over the years.

1. Figure out what you want to give to your participants. The NEXT question is what you or your company wants from the community. The order is very important as John Hagel mentioned in his morning session about participant centric communities.
2. Understand why you want to have a community. Is it for promoting your point of view (not a great reason for participants to get passionate about), OR is it to give them a voice? Or like Intuit its to help them share among each other?
3. Formulate a core team. Our average internal team size has been 3.2 (no more .2 jokes I promise). Preferably a cross functional team of marketing, product and customer evanglists.
4. Do a quick survey of your customers. Understand what they want out of it. E.g. Sean from Fidelity was mentioning to me that they realize their customers dont get “passionate” about 401K - but their community is all about ANSWERING questions their members have. On the opposite end, Jake mentioned LEGO customers wanted to give their input into what they love about the product.
5. Put a good marketing plan for HOW you plan to make your community AWARE that you are around. It should include simple promotion materials, the benefits of joining, what they will get out of it, etc.

6. Identify your influencers - the first few that will really help you get started and get religion. How are you going to help them get others to get religion?
7. Learn about the technology:  You dont need to know HOW it works, but more HOW IT CAN APPLY to help your participants. Learning the basics about RSS, Wikis, blogs, etc. does help but we will share in another post how to

8. Clearly identify your resource plan: Who is spending time to answer questions, who will help with customer engagement, who is going to moderate or who is going to help market to customers.
9. Put together a simple BUSINESS Justification:  You are probably going to have to sell it to management. Use simple NOT complicate Net Present Value metrics for tangible ROI. Use customer engagement metrics such as number of people who will sign up. etc.
10. Get it going. Its okay just start and see how you can figure it out. Most good communities started small and grew.

Again, this is not a “just add water” recipe, but a list of items that we follow. Feedback welcome.