How to Build an On-Line Community

Today we held a workshop at IE with Pedro Jareño, from Minube.com, ambitious travel site founded in Spain, which recently expanded into France, Italy, Portugal, and China. Pedro is in the travel discovery business inspiring travellers into discovering places to go and things to do there. The biggest representative of this interesting category is tripadvisor.com. The revenue comes mainly from so called “Quality Plan”, a scheme that promotes certain region or city at the web site by creating professional content about the place and placing it at the front page.

90% of the content at Minube.com is user generated with all the pros and cons associated with that. Typically, the greatest cons of such content is lower quality and lack of comprehensiveness. On the other hand, content from users bears a badge of authenticity and personal touch. I believe that users generated content is characterized by the “snowball effect”. The more content you have, the more comments, photos, experiences you get. Therefore, I would suggest Minube.com to generate more of its professional content about various places and encourage users to comment, add videos, maybe even correct some information. By doing that Minube.com will mature in terms of amount and quality of information provided, but without losing the social community aspect of the site.

The whole session was centred around the topic of creating and managing the communities. Here is Pedro’s “manual” how to build a community at Minube.com:

1. Target identification (travellers, bloggers, active users)

a. Look for travel bloggers everywhere (found 2,000 blogs)

b. Wrote to each of them about the minube.com

2. Get users

a. Tell a story what we are and why they are important

b. Contests to attract travelers advertised at other sites or community portals

c. Create a friendly brand - community is about feelings

3. Invite dynamics into the community

a. Let users feel that you are interested in them

b. Every day show some activity

c. Keep conversations going

d. Organize contests to let users participate

e. Users get badges for activity

4. Retain users

a. Increase community loyalty by organizing “off-line” events

b. Send newsletters AND reply to answers you get

5. Public recognition

a. Prizes, gratitude, badges

b. User picture / video / post of the day

There are following key factors in building successful community:

1. Constant innovation

2. Passion is contagious

3. Reveal the human behind the brand (e.g. founders)

4. Be honest, be what you are

5. Focus on your topic e.g. traveling

In conclusion, building your business around a community is always risky, but when you can offer superior product with good community management, feasible. Anyway, in world of today brands and companies do not decide who they are, the people decide.