How-To: Creating a Wildly Successful Community of Users
5 Tips from Intuit's Scott Wilder
Scott Wilder, Group Manager for Intuit's QuickBooks product, wanted to form a centralized place where users of the product could find answers to their questions. So he started a community where small businesses can ask and answer questions about QuickBooks, meet others in similar industries and share ideas about using the product. The site currently generates 1.5 million page views per month.
Here, Scott shares his tips on making an online community for businesspeople work:
Tip #1. Create infrastructure for questions
When dealing with small businesses, questions are par for the course, and every business' questions are unique. While no single person can possibly answer them all, an environment that invites questions and answers from businesses of all types always has someone with answers.
Tip #2. Understand how comfortable users are with technology
While blogs are everywhere in the press, not every individual is comfortable with them. Scott learned early on that QuickBooks Community users were more comfortable with discussion boards than with blogs.
Tip #3. Foster relationships
First, make sure that the environment has a variety of individuals from a variety of backgrounds. For example, the QuickBooks Community has people with expertise in different areas -- lawyers, accountants, nonprofits, etc.
Then, build relationships with some of them in the same way that those individuals are building relationships with each other. And because most word of mouth happens offline, be sure to encourage offline relationships as well.
Tip #4. Utilize user-created content
User-created content is an excellent trigger for discussion. By making the content accessible and easy to find, those discussions happen much more easily.
Tip #5. Have a moderator
A moderator is useful in connecting people in similar industries and with similar interests, challenges, and problems. That's important when a site has a lot of information where it may be difficult for people with like interests to find each other. In the QuickBooks Community, the moderator sometimes even arranges for people to get together offline, as well.
SPECIAL NOTE
You can learn more from Scott and meet him in person at WOMBAT 2. He's set to speak on a panel during Day 2 about how to evangelize word of mouth within a large company.
More about Scott:
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