Never Wait For The Website To Be Ready

You can spend a lot of time waiting for the platform to be just right. Everything has to look perfect right? ...or members wont participate?

Wrong. 

An imperfect platform, a few dead links and improper load-testing wont cause your community efforts to fail. Few people leave a community because they don't like the design. The only thing which does deter members is a lack of activity. 

Nobody spends a second of their time writing posts for a forum without any activity. Nobody invests anything into a community if they’re not going to get a reaction. The anticipation of the response is why people contribute to a community.

Stop worrying about having a perfect looking platform and start worrying about getting a high level of activity by the time you go live. 

Don't wait for your community site to be ready. Start now. Begin stimulating that activity. Begin reaching out to people and building a list of interested members. Get to know them. Invite them to join e-mail groups. Ask for their feedback. Ask relevant questions to increase engagement.

By the time you launch your community, you should have a force of momentum to ensure your community succeeds.

The illusion you want to give isn’t of a slick-operation with a great web designer in the background. It’s of a manic, activity-packed, community bursting at the seams.

Comments

[Mike Vaz DragonSearch]

This is great as long as your community isn't based of a brand or service that your website is supposed to be providing. If it's just community based off of a common interest, then yes all of this does apply but if you're attempting to build community for a brand, I think a finished website is essential for initial engagement with people.

[Mor_trisha]

Completely agree - thanks for posting this Rich! I learned this when launching our customer community. I was wearing my pixel-face nit-pick hat (leftover from my old MarCom days). The project manager finally had to say, in a nice way, 'Look lady - do you want to launch this thing or not?!'

And we launched with graphic imperfections, and the customers took to the platform right away, and life is good!

[Tommy Sollén]

And of course, if you do this right the first members can help shape the community, its design and its features.

I hope to pull this off myself very soon.