Community forums have gone from nice to have to mandatory part of any online initiative. To successfully engage users in a meaningful and interactive way is a dream for any online management team. Doing that requires luck, hard work and lot of iterations.

Here are few tips which can act as a quick checklist to make sure your community initiatives are in-sync with user objectives:

Make sure content is relevant and dynamic. One trick is to think of it as a restaurant and patrons want to come and eat fresh. Any stale information will be treated with boredom and will discourage repeat visit.

Complement community forum with feedback tools. Polls, gallery, code snippet and puzzles are some good examples for technology oriented community forum.

Let audience get their sense of ownership. This is usually a tough call as its hard to give up control To seed trust you will have to let people run with the threads. Famous “benevolent dictator” comes handy here.

We will continue to chew over these tips and add some more as we learn more.

Let us know what is working for you?

So instead of “hello world”, we have “hello community”. We have lot of interesting content to share here so stick around.

Open source community is a different game altogether. Participants of open source communities are usually a very passionate lot. So keeping an eye on the different communities for fun and knowledge purpose is a cool thing to do.