Give Them What They Want (To Get What You Need)

In a previous article, Answering the Question of 'Why', I spoke about the need to have measurable objectives for your enterprise community. Equally important, though, are the goals/motivations of your target members. You can think of your community management as the steering wheel of a car and your members as the engine. Without your business objectives to steer by, the car is aimless and and headed for a crash. But without continual motivation fueling your members, all the steering in the world won't get you anywhere.

To put it another way, I tend to think of building a community site in many ways like developing a product. There must be a benefit that the company hopes to obtain in building it, but there must also be a benefit for the users in order for them to adopt it. Forget either side of this equation, and the product (or the community) falters. Consider what your members will want from your community to make sure that their needs are going to be met as well.

On the Lithosphere, we believe the motivations of our target members to participate will be fairly similar to those of our customers' support communities:

To ask questions of a wider audience
To find out what their peers are doing
To obtain validation from other members
To get support outside of Lithium business hours
To see Lithium’s best
That Lithium is listening

The first four points are why members would participate in any support community on a topic of value to them. The last two express the key reasons why they would come to a community that Lithium maintains.

So take the time to find out what your members' needs and motivations are, learn what drives them to participate productively in your community. Once you know why members will participate, you are that much closer to figuring out how to make your community valuable to both of you.