Perhaps The Best Online Community I've Seen

Tommy Sollén deserves more recognition. He’s created one of the best online communities I’ve ever seen.

The tragedy of online communities is the best community managers are often handicapped by poor websites, and the best community websites by poor community managers. Sweden got lucky.

Tommy has fused the best elements of community design from across the web into an excellent community based upon recognition, fame and influence.

• Great Design & Navigation. It’s beautifully designed and easy to navigate. It feels the way a modern community website should.
• Register in 30 seconds. Enter your e-mail, receive an e-mail and join. You only need to enter your name and country, anything else is optional. Good use of LinkedIn’s profile complete % nudge.
• Invite friends. When you register you can invite friends from a range of services. Great use of capitalising upon existing connections.
• Internal blog. There is an internal development blog, but most people don’t know it. It recognises the top members, asks opinions on updates and critiques areas of the community.
• Rating Systems. Everything is rated and ranked by members of the community for each other.
• Rankings. Everyone is ranked against each other. All content is given thumbs up.
• Geotagging. Tagging is a mysterious to most folk. But it works wonders for Visit Sweden. All content is geographically tagged and displayed on a geographic map.
• Recognition. Top members are interviewed in the development blog, other milestones are achieved.
• Help for stories. Rather than let stories happen, Tommy has provided some examples of stories to use.
• Who’s been here? Visitors plot where in Sweden they have been. You can approach people that have been to the places you intend to go.
• Widget. You can use a widget to display your content elsewhere. It’s great promotion.
• Widgets for embedding content elsewhere
• Editors’ highlights. A community is a busy place. If you’re busy you can read the editor’s well chosen highlights. Good way to amplify the signal amongst the noise.

Community of Sweden is one of the best designed and implemented communities I’ve ever seen. While there is no doubt that business objectives were vital, you get the overwhelming impression that Tommy was committed to creating an amazing community.

Comments

[Jose]

I agree. What I really like about Tommy's approach is he keep's the community involved and engaged thru his development blog. Great work!

[Mark]

He didn't actually build anything himself.

[Tommy Sollén]

Hi Richard!
Wow, thank you. Those are some very kind words indeed :)

I'm glad you like CommunityOfSweden.com and I'm proud of our members. It's a great bunch of Sweden loving people from all over the world.

I'm happy to say we have a lot of exciting new features and improvements in the works with releases after the summer. So stay tuned ;)

Aren't you dying for a CommunityOfSweden.com widget in this blog btw? ;)

Mark: That's true. I haven't programmed a single line of code in 5-6 years.
Nowdays I leave that to the professionals.

[Richard Millington]

You're more than welcome Tommy, it's a fantastic community you've got there. My only gripe is the number of spam messages newcomers get when they join. If you can fix that, it'd be a 10 :)

Mark: I'm glad Tommy didn't program any of it. It moves commnuity management away from web development and towards social development.

It's the vision and the ability to execute the vision in such a way that's impressive.