Online community platforms are becoming more and more prevalent as part of companies’ online toolkits. Built initially with only basic forums (a.k.a. message boards and threaded discussion lists), they continue to develop dramatically in scale and scope, providing arrays of features and capabilities for community members (your customers), moderators, administrators, business sponsors, and other key stakeholders.
Customer communities can empower customers and strengthen the relationships between them and your company. This happens through careful planning, assigning sufficient resources, and selecting the right tools. While you should never discount the human element in achieving your goals, the underlying technology—your platform—also plays an essential role in your community’s success.
We’ve developed this framework to help you evaluate online community platforms and identify the one that’s best for you. This third version reflects the technological advances and increased expectations for what community platforms can and should be able do. The past year has seen many changes in the online community space, including an emphasis on collaboration, viral marketing, search engine optimization, and mobile access. To address these and other changes, this framework contains new and updated customer scenarios and criteria for evaluating community platforms.
This report is the third version of our online community platform framework. It takes into account current trends, increased expectations, and new technologies since the last version was published in January 2008. New sections and criteria in this version include:
Discussion of the evaluation process from two perspectives: (1) identifying a platform to support a new community, and (2) identifying a platform to which an established community will be migrated (as would be the case if your are unhappy with the existing platform, or if the community has outgrown its capabilities)
- Addition of several Collaboration criteria: Idea Engines and Presence Awareness
- Addition of Community Participation criterion: Viral Tools (such as “Invite a Friend” and “Send to a Friend”)
- Addition of several Architecture criteria: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Support for Mobile Devices
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