1. Prioritize Your Business Objectives & Pick Your Target

Most likely, you’re not hurting for ideas from your user community to do something online. It’s the “something” that can present a problem. In short, make sure your business objectives map to specific company goals. If the CEO’s goal is to reduce support costs, you might want to start with customer service and work through the organization from that vantage point. You should also think about how to gain cross-departmental leverage with your approach. Just because customer service has blogging capabilities doesn’t mean the same process and platform can’t be used by sales and marketing.

2. Start Small And Build Incrementally

As the saying goes, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Invariably, creating content, developing the right user experience and managing content will take longer than you think. Often, it’s better to look at online community efforts as unique programs with unique requirements. Marketers know there’s no one size fits all anymore. In fact, more communities and brand messages are dictated and delivered by the customers themselves. With that approach, you can build, test and deploy smaller projects that allow you to re-direct and re-prioritize in midstream.

3. Set Realistic Goals And Expectations

Decide what you’ll measure. Ask yourself if you could walk into the CEO’s office and deliver tangible evidence that your online community is helping the business. While everything can’t be proven by hard numbers, you can show how your content is consumed, how the market perceives your products, or how sales now has a 360-degree view of your customers. And keep it simple. One organization’s goal was to increase the number of customer testimonials it could garner over a 6-month period. As a result of engaging with its customers online, the company was able to convert those participants into brand advocates.

4.Identify Your Partners

While you may consider yourself the SuperStrategist, you can’t do it alone. Fortunately though, access to world-class technology is no longer your biggest challenge — it’s human capital. While many times marketing will own the brand or community initiative, there’s a few more moving parts you need to be aware of. Technology-wise, do your homework and talk to a few analysts and end-users in your vertical. You’ll quickly find the platforms and tool sets have matured rapidly and will give you most (if not all) of what you need out-of-the-box. Strategic alliances can range from content partners and advertisers, to PR firms and other SEO or social media marketing firms. Odds are you can do most of the heavy lifting and planning yourself, but having a strategic resource to bounce things off and help you build a longer-term roadmap is key.

5. Develop a Community Roadmap

Again, think of your community with longer-term lenses. Don’t get too crazy, but take your wish list and siphon it down into manageable parts. For example, if your goal is to get every executive blogging, make sure you’ve developed an onramp for different skill sets and adoption paths. The approach you used to get the early-adopter execs creating content might not work for others. Less sophisticated users might prefer you show them how to upload a Video blog (Vlog) after you’ve taped them. The community roadmap will be your primer for how things will be delivered, sustained and measured. Marketers should also engage with toolset vendors’ professional services teams. There’s a good chance they’ve built their own roadmap.

6. Develop a Marketing Plan To Rally The Needed Support

Some of the toughest marketing you’ll ever do involves converting the naysayers or those satisfied with the status quo. Internally, market to those executives with phrases like:

• -“Do you know what our customers are saying about our products?”
  -“I want to reduce our support costs.”

“Are we capturing the right intellectual capital to speed innovation?”

Externally, always be ready to answer the question – “What’s in it for me?” Some findings show that as little as 1% are super-users, so be thinking about the value proposition for passive users and lurkers. Think about your users’ technographics (Forrester term) here. If you’ve identified your super-users, there’s a good chance they’ll be on the lookout for your Facebook page or RSS feed. Conversely, late techno bloomers probably won’t mind an opt-in email campaign.