In Special-Purpose Communities Steak Trumps Sizzle

A consulting project I'm working on includes helping a global brand optimize and grow a special-purpose professional networking community. After the community had been in place a couple of months the client wanted to ask members what new features they'd like to see. Normally I'm all about putting the customer first, but in this case I thought it was the wrong approach. When you're building a social network in a niche market the steak should come first: get the fundamentals right. Leave the sizzle for later.

First, it's important not to set expectations you can't fulfill. In this case, the client is using a hosted solution built around a template with a limited feature set. Giving community members an open-ended invitation to suggest features the client can't deliver has a high probability of disappointment. They're likely to start listing fun or flashy applications that caught their eye on Facebook...the type of thing that builds engagement once you're a loyal member but may not correlate to establishing the core value that motivates someone to join and return in the first place.

In the early going it's smarter to concentrate on a straightforward presentation (think Google) of basic activities that create value, such as sharing questions and information and facilitating connections between people who want to find each other. Discussion groups, blogs, wikis, ratings, Q&A, and some type of personal matching engine are a good start. Early on, focus marketing efforts on building usage of essential features rather than on proliferating functionality. If the underlying concept of your community is on target, people will sign up and return with or without the extra bells and whistles. After it reaches critical mass and is yielding a positive ROI you can invest in sizzle to generate more usage and time on site.

Furthermore, while it never hurts to open communication channels and invite people to talk back, when you're operating online you don't need surveys to reveal the activities people like best. With recall more perfect than any questionnaire responses, your web analytics disclose what features people do and don't use, where they spend the most time, when they visit, and the paths they take through your site. To understand how your community is working, dive into site stats.

Here's a great example of how, in the world of special-purpose online communities, steak trumps sizzle. Just this week some former colleagues in Brazil launched a community for IT and telecom professionals, CW Connect. To get the community up and running quickly they chose a US vendor's hosted solution. In some cases, page templates unavoidably and a bit awkwardly mix English and Portuguese. But instead of stressing over imperfections, my friends focused on the opportunity of launching the first professional networking site in their market in Brazil. Instead of Facebook "feature envy" they kept it simple. The plan paid off: Brazilian IT and telecom professionals who haven't had a venue for making connections and sharing solutions are flocking to CW Connect. CW Connect is starting with a good steak, which means there will be opportunities for lots more sizzle in the future.