Engaging the community

Involving people from the start to create something they actually want

  • how to get to know the people you are hoping will use what you’re building
  • why successful internet projects usually involve getting people face-to-face
  • what happens when you design things around your users

One of the most important lessons from our case studies and elsewhere is that the key to a successful ‘social by social’ project is close engagement with users and stakeholders. Engagement is not an add-on – it should be fundamental to your business model, technology design, marketing strategy and evaluation processes. Build it and they may well not come. Build relationships and they probably will.

In this noisy ‘information age’, the biggest challenge has become attracting people’s attention. The web in particular is an interactive medium, which means people make conscious choices about what they read and watch online. Push marketing is therefore ineffective as users will simply avoid content they are not looking for, or that is not ‘useful’ to them. User tolerance for irrelevant content and functionality is plummeting, and the need for a clear understanding of what users want to do on the site, and for providing consistently relevant information and services, are paramount to building successful online content. Usability and user experience are still important, but so too is the need for ‘usefulness’ – having tangible functionality and valuable content that people can make use of in their lives.

By far the best way to ensure that the platform you build will actually be used by your target audiences is to involve them in the process of creating it. Involved and engaging users and stakeholders from the start makes it easier to create something that they value (because you don’t have to guess what they need, they will tell you), and also gives you a ready-made army of evangelists to promote it after launch.