Tips and best practices for building a great forum community

In the case of this forum, we started by announcing on blogs where we know intelligent people were already hanging out, thus the culture was set by people who you'd want to be setting your culture.

The moderator has a difficult but important job. If you stifle too much, it's not a thriving community; if you allow anything and everything, it gets overrun by crap or worse -- ads.

Using software like StackExchange (which powers this site) helps because of the self-fulfilling voting system.

Recruit someone to be the community manager. The most active and dynamic forums will have a community manager or two who interact with the community on a regular basis (weekly or even daily) Like any group of end users, they will appreciate the fact that someone in the company is there to engage them. It eliminates that distance that many large corporations have between themselves and their customers.

Anyone in the company can do this role as long as they are people oriented and well spoken. The key is they must interact regularly. If the role is changed, or the community interaction is few and far between, the community will not feel connected to your organization. Engage your users and engage them often! Show them that you care!

Good advice from the others. I would just reinforce that Content (as always) is key. Don't invite the masses until you've got a decent amount of interesting discussion going on. As people start showing up one at a time and see the party is empty, they'll move on.

Plenty of great forums have built slowly and I expect you'll do the same, but start with something to keep their attention. It's hard enough to get people to your site, make sure you can keep them.

One other piece of advice, Forums are great for search engine traffic. Make sure everything is optimized to take advantage of it.

Oh, and keep out the jerks!

Some other important points to remember when managing a community:

• know your audience - pay attention to user demographics so you can reach as many people as possible and tailor your communications to suit the interests of your community.

• listen to your audience - answer any/all questions and address suggestions/feedback. and definitely follow up publicly when you have implemented any ideas coming from the community.

• be consistent - set up an internal schedule for communications so users have a good feel for how often they can expect updates. users want to know that you care and are paying attention.

• empower community members - once you get enough users, invite some moderators. these folks should be the most active participants who are already consistently offering good quality support and information to fellow community members.

• share with your community - be as transparent as you can when announcing new features or other company news. it's also cool to share articles, blog posts, and other generally newsworthy items with your users. if they can get interesting, industry-related updates from your forum, they are likely to come back more often.

• cross-promote - if you are utlizing a company blog, twitter, facebook, linkedin (etc.) you should align these communications to link back to one another (ie. update your twitter and fb status each time you publish a new blog post).

• measure community performance - once you've established the goals you want to achieve via this forum, set up some benchmarks for metrics that speak to this. whether it's viewing traffic, # of posts, # of answered posts in a given time frame, # of new users, user rentention, it's important to track your metrics often enough to give you a sense of community health.

• be authentic - "keeping it real" is important. you can be casual and professional simultaneously.

To speak to one of the comments above - "Anyone in the company can do this role as long as they are people oriented and well spoken." - I would be careful in choosing the person who takes on this role. In order to keep up with a burgeoning community, and avoid burn-out, this person should ideally be very passionate about communication and community-building as well.