Designing Web-Based Communities for Professionals

Designing online communities for business is a subtle blend of creating the right business model, a clear understanding and service of member needs and a usable interface that enables professionals to focus on engagement.  Too often, however, the design of professional communities draw inspiration from consumer communities and try to mirror the user experience they experience on non-work based social applications.  Frequently, there are far too many bells and whistles - gratuitous features - built into the design of B2B communities that can get in the way of successful use of the community of practice.  While sexy widgets are neat playthings for users who are browsing communities for social or fun reasons, in a workplace setting, they just serve as distractions to getting the job done, the information shared or found, or the connection accomplished to solve a business problem. One of the main reasons why online communities for business often fail to provide a meaningful user experience is a lack of understanding about best practice design for professionals. 


With this in mind, I have invited my colleague, Tania Schlatter, to be a guest blogger and share her thoughts on building online communities for business from a design perspective.  Tania is co-founder of Nimble Partners, and an award-winning designer who focuses on human-centered websites and applications.

Now onto Tania's thoughts about context and guidelines to keep in mind when creating user interface requirements, selecting a designer or firm, and overseeing the design and production of an online community for professionals...

What’s unique about designing for a professional community?
Professional online communities don’t need slick features and interfaces to be vibrant and successful. In fact, online communities such as Usenet were at the heart of the birth of the Internet in 1980 and were successful in plain text – before there were graphical web browsers. Usenet newsgroups were lists of topics discussed by reading messages and responding to them in text. Even now, there are active online professional communities that use only text-based mailing lists for interaction, but they are dwindling as the number of graphical tools increases and the cost of developing with them goes down. Yet the essential ingredient remains the same today as it was in 1980 – passionate contributors – which has nothing to do with technical platforms, interface widgets and their design.

The proliferation of low-cost tools has created the expectation that a “best in class” community will usually employ the latest technology. How do you navigate this gap between what’s needed and what’s expected?

What is are the first strategic steps in the design process?
Before you make decisions about features and visual design, you need to know who is interested in your community and what their preferred tools and methods of communication are.

For example, executives we talked to in supply chain management were interested in being able to contact peers with whom they share an academic research partner, but they do not want to do so in real-time. How do we know this? When designing a partner-only site for sponsors of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, we talked with executives and asked them to select the most interesting content and features from a list of possibilities. We also asked what kind of information and interactions they wanted, and how they expected to use the site. Before talking with the execs, the client was considering a chat feature. Afterwards, we realized that partners were much more interested in robust search features, a discussion section and summaries of research. Had we pinned the site interaction on chat, it would have failed.

The key to taking advantage of the tools available today is to base the community’s feature set on user behavior and how the tools fit their objectives. Learning about your community members in the planning stage allows you to make informed decisions throughout the design, development and management of the site. It helps ensure that the look and feel and features you offer match what users need and want.

Interviews
When planning the community, it is essential to get input from representative users. There are a number of ways to do this quickly and inexpensively, although they may require a fair amount of management to identify participants and schedule interview sessions.

Identify 8-12 potential community members with whom your team has a rapport. Ideally, meet with them one-on-one briefly in person or schedule a 15-minute call. Find out what social media tools they are currently using for business, when and why they use them, what their pressing concerns are, and if/how those needs are being met. This number of interviews will provide a good range of input while still being manageable. If you have a community with a diverse set of user types, such as a community for lawyers that covers many specialties, you may need to interview 3-4 representatives of each major group.

Document what you know

• Document the business perspective: identify and articulate the organization’s goals for the community. What will make it successful? Are there metrics?

• Develop user scenarios. User scenarios are stories about who will come to the site and why, told from the user perspective. They should be composites of what you learned from the interviews and should define the most common examples of what people will be looking for and sharing, and the situation of use. You can create these with your own team or with the help of a community builder or user experience designer. Developing scenarios is a good test of concepts – if your scenarios feel forced, the team will know there may not yet be compelling reasons for people to use the community.

Visual design
Your community’s overall look and feel should generally be simple, straightforward and convey aspects of the parent brand to keep the focus on interaction and content. But “simple” doesn't mean “undesigned“ – every element, intentional or not, will communicate. 

At a minimum, the design of the community should include:

• logo or unique typographic treatment for the name of the community (Identity)
• color palette
• graphic style for navigation
• typographic treatment of all text including heads

Home page and profile page templates for INmobile.org invitation-only community for executives in the wireless industry.

Does the community need to look like the corporate web site?
Unless you’re creating a stand-alone community unconnected to a business or organization, the design of the community should relate to the parent organization’s logo, typography, and other brand elements. Chances are that community members are aware of the connection to a parent brand or sponsor, and that this is a key reason they’re drawn to the community. A familiar look will help people feel comfortable and confident that the community possesses the same high-quality characteristics of the parent brand or organization.

Communities often have a growing body of content. How should the content be structured?  Even blogs and communities need a solid information architecture. In an online community, this may take the form of categories for features and discussion forums, as well as tags that help users narrow in on the content that most interests them. Search is an essential and expected feature, and ideally provides more than just keyword-based results, such as results organized by type – article, discussion topic, video, etc.

To develop the information structure, list and prioritize features and content based on what you’ve learned, and have the designer or developer create a prototype or wireframe sketches. These are great tools for usability testing, and will allow the team to explore options for the best ways to engage your community members.

Wireframe sketch for a home page for partner executives of MIT’s CTL Program

What are the most important features to have in the community?
Remember the success of text-only communities? Include only the essential features that you know will allow people to find information, share it and exchange ideas in a way that fits their situation and the parent organization’s goals.

For example, features that show activity are likely to encourage participation, like a crowded restaurant: “everyone’s here – it must be good.” Other features are a less certain win. Josh Porter, a designer who specializes in community UIs, recommends the use of ranking contributors (“reputation points”). In his experience, successful communities hold participants accountable for their contributions, and the possibility of recognition encourages “good” behavior and discourages “bad” behavior. In my experience, like real-time chat, a feature like this is never an automatic “must have” – it can make or break a community, and should be implemented only if it fits the culture of your community and facilitates sharing.

After the community has been designed, what needs to happen to maintain it?
The key to maintaining your site’s design is consistency: using the color palette, type styles and page templates when adding content or making any changes. These elements are a rulebook for ensuring your community continues to look neat and professional. Make sure your designer provides a style guide or other document explaining how to keep the site looking great, and that the developer is willing and available to make changes if and when needed.

Moderator's Reading List For Online Community

The demand to build online communities has been accelerated by the fashion of social media. Consequently the roots and best practices of moderation are often overlooked due to the pressures to perform. However, online community building requires skill -a cultivated skill - in order to create a productive and safe environment for information exchange. Online communities can be of great value to organizations seeking to foster relationship building, increase customer intimacy, and to better understand the needs of their members (and therefore have the ability to translate those needs into service offerings or products).

We believe that the act of building communities for business is a strategic initiative that can fuel the lifeblood of an organization. The information gathered through the give-and-take of dialogue can be leveraged to benefit both the customer and the company by serving to inform and change the ways the company does business; Perhaps there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with a product ... through the community, the organization can learn about it before it becomes persistent, and perhaps issue an product upgrade. Maybe there is a new hot issue brewing within an industry... the community is likely to identify it quickly - which leaves the company in a position to respond.  There are some of the ways that well moderated conversations can make a competitive difference.

Online communities are of greatest value to a company when they are managed internally as the customer relationships are much too important, especially in the B2B realm, to leave to an outside agency. But, in order to be successful, the act of supporting interactive areas needs to be conducted wisely. In our training workshops where we teach community management skills within companies who manage social sites, we often leave behind a summary of readings so that the community facilitators can continue to have resources at hand when questions arise.

Here are some articles that we believe can be most helpful to both novice and expert community managers alike...


The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online
by Howard Rheingold
This web page contains an extensive list of moderating tips and of ways to model good conversational behavior.


Building Professional Peer Communities: An Interview with Vanessa DiMauro
by Matthew D. Lees
This interview provides a good historical overview of online Communities of Practice. It also discusses some concrete areas of online community building, such as establishing trust, member relations, and active moderation.

Calming Threads of Conflict in Online Forums
by Nancy White
This summary of a list conversation discusses useful strategies for a moderator who is dealing with challenging postings in their online community.

Communities of practice: a brief introduction
by Etienne Wenger
An introductory article to Communities of Practice, it includes a list of nine activities through which communities can develop their practice, including problem solving, seeking experiences and mapping knowledge.


Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge: Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice
by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder
This excerpt from Harvard Business School Press discusses the successful elements of a Community of Practice and how to more fully engage members.

Guidelines for Managing Virtual Discussion Groups
by CARE Academy
This two page handout identifies four categories of online communities, key moderator roles and commitments, and sample evaluative measures.


How Online Social Networks Benefit Organizations
by Lisa Kimball and Howard Rheingold
This article discusses ten ways that an online social network brings value to a corporation, with a description of moderator strategies to achieve each goal.

Preliminary Heuristics for the Design and Evaluation of Online Communities of Practice Systems
by Mark Notess and Josh Plaskoff
Written by a professor at Indiana University, this article identifies nine heuristics from a review of academic online community research. For each, the authors identify key questions to be considered.

A Roundtable Discussion About Online Professional Development: Three EDC experts in online professional development discuss the evolution of the field
by Dan Tobin (interviewing Judith Zorfass, Glenn Kleiman, and Robert Spielvogel)
Three early creators and researchers of online professional communities discuss successful facilitation techniques, activities to engage the community and methods of evaluation.

Top Tips for Moderators of Online Discussion Groups
by William Spitzer, Kelly Wedding, and Vanessa DiMauro
Adapted from a moderating book published by TERC – a pioneer in online professional development ­– this article shares moderating strategies, including asking questions to encourage participation, composing thoughtful responses, and promoting reflective dialogues.

Why communities of practice succeed and why they fail
by Gilbert Probst and Stefano Borzillo
Published in European Management Journal, this academic article identifies ten reasons that Communities of Practice succeed and five reasons why they fail. Moderator techniques are described along with a corporate example for each.

There is also some good stuff to be found on the download section of the Leader Networks site

Please add to this list to help grow a useful body of work for all of us community builders!

Can Social Media Co-Exist with Traditional Marketing?

A thought leadership storm happened recently in the Social Media Today LinkedIn group.  My colleague, Jack Greene, asked a seemingly simple question in the discussion forum - "Can social media co-exist with traditional marketing?"  Jack was curious about what peers thought about the matter so he posted his ideas for people to respond. And what happened next was a veritable flood of controversy, emotions, and productive idea exchange.  More than 200 people responded within the span of a few weeks and the conversation is still going on! Clearly, Jack's single question opened Pandora's box.

The cascade of opinions regarding whether social media can co-exist with traditional marketing fell into the following three categories: (a) those favoring traditional marketing, (b) those supporting an integrated approach and (c) those who believe solely in social media practices.  What I found amazing is the passion with which people responded. Camps formed: business people, executives, social media leaders and consumers all shared their opinions, concerns and excitement about the role social media can play within the marketing domain.

Jack tapped into more than the question du jour; he pointed to the elephant in the (conference) room. The question is really whether social media is its own domain. Is it a practice, a strategy, a discrete operation or is it a tool, tactic or strategy within Marketing?  This taps into a host of questions:

• Staffing - Should marketing folks be the executors of social media or should it have its own dedicated skill set?  
• Budget - Who owns social media within the organization?   
• Measurement - Can social media measurements be isolated or does it need to occur within a larger context of ROI? and,  
• Organizational structure - Is social media stand-alone or should it be integrated into the larger value chain in order to be meaningful?

The discussion never comes to complete resolution of these questions, and in fact, it surfaces even more questions than it answers. Perhaps, today, there are no clear answers.  But the art of knowing the right questions to ask is often more important than the actual answers themselves.

Jack Greene invoked an idea storm from around the world with a simple question - and clearly one that needed to be asked. He has created a great report that summarizes the discussion and its main findings. You can download it here. Click on Resources at the bottom of the page to access the report  (in full disclosure I helped him with it) and let's keep the discussion going inside organizations for the answers lie within the questions. Lets keep the discussion going... what do you think?

Why Every Company Is A Media Company

What do you get when a VP of Influencer Relations from SAP, the founder of Silicon-Valley Watcher and former Financial Times Journalist and a Social Media strategist come together? The answer is lively discussions and debate about the impact of social media upon business. Don Bulmer, Tom Foremski and I have recently formed a lyceum of sorts and meet regularly to discuss this very topic.  In addition to thoroughly engaging and timely discussion, we are also forming a framework for understanding social media in a business context. We believe that social strategy is and needs to become about more than just marketing, and will be woven into the very fabric of the enterprise as a strategic platform.

We are actively exploring the idea that every company is a media company. Initially, I had a negative, knee-jerk reaction that this didn’t concept sound right. How can every company be a media company? Why would every company need or want to be a media company? When this idea was first introduced by Tom Foremski, my mind quickly went to a mis-interpretation of the concept.. every company is a media company meaning that each should be mini-publisher, every organization now needing to be burdened with complex publishing cycles. I recoiled from the thesis... Everyone knows that enterprise success is predicated on competitive advantage, best products and services, excellent customer service, and right pricing. Being a media company is the last thing strategic executives need to have on their minds to excel in today’s global economy!

But the more we talked about this concept – the better I understood and the more I agreed. The reality is that every company today and into the future faces a new reality: the need for speed and relevance in the market. Competition is stiff in most industries and due to the recession, we face a “new normal” of doing more with less budget, fewer staff, and a reduction in experimental or innovation projects that are geared towards discovery. Plainly spoken, companies need to “get it right” to survive. I have written extensively in my blog about the Engagement Cycle; the basic tenant is that the more a company engages with clients and prospects, the more likely they are to gain awareness, insight, and ideas into the market’s needs. Through the sheer act of engaging with the very constituents they hope to attract they can begin to strengthen relationships that are at the very core of the buyer decision-making process. This belief was reinforced through the research that Don and I did called The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks (under our research fellowships with SNCR) where we found that decision makers are increasingly relying on social media driven peer networks to make buying decisions. In fact, in-person and social media driven relationships are almost equally as trustworthy, according to the survey participants.

Re-enter the idea that every company is a media company…. Media, and specifically social media, is the wellspring for relationships. It is the source of information, collaboration and dialogue with the market that can, and will, inform enterprise about the needs of their buyers and influencers.

When media is used strategically and effectively, many of the answers to these burning questions can become clearer and help shape competitive strategies for success. On the flip side, people are already talking about notable companies, brands and products. The dialogue already exists, outside the control of the enterprise throughout online and offline channels – in email, phone conversations, industry gatherings, Twitter, blogs, online peer networks and groups The buzz – both positive and negative- happens with or without intervention but unlike in the past – before social media – enterprises now have an opportunity and, in fact, a standing invitation to participate. And, they also have an opportunity to share the leading thinking in the market. Most successful companies got to their levels of achievement, in part, due to their deep understanding of their industry and its nuances. Thought leadership is the new relationship conduit. Through the effective use of thought leadership platforms, made so agile on social media, companies can “be the media” by sharing and showcasing content and ideas of value. They can participate and in some instances lead and shape the dialogue, not as an overt marketing channel, but through earnest efforts to educate and inform about the issues and topics relevant to their segment.

As Don so eloquently summarized in a recent blog post on the topic “The way that people (consumers, employees, partners and influencers) are using social technologies to inform, shape and share their opinions has quickly become a priority for business leaders to understand and appreciate as they (re)define their corporate strategies and operational business plans. Many companies are actively looking to incorporate ‘social strategy’ and social thinking into the core of their innovation process (research and development), service and support operations, sales and partner programs, and of course employee engagement efforts.”

So, through this lens of urgency and strategic value, Tom Foremski, Don Bulmer and I have begun to capture key concepts, best practice and look forward to the future where all competitive organizations are weaving social strategy across the value chain. We are soon to launch a new blog together to explore the ideas with you and are also creating a framework for putting the ideas into the business content to help companies in their charters.

Coming full circle to the platitude that every company is a media company, I believe the answer is yes! Through the act of creating, leading and engaging, companies take a more participatory role in shaping their future.

When Cops Talk, Crimes Get Solved

Social media's embrace by business is now commonplace.  But it is with unbridled joy that I am now able to tell you about an online community that is dedicated to connecting crime fighters nationally! Yes, you heard me correctly, there is an online community for Federal, State and Local Law Enforcement to share tips, information, crime fighting resources and connect with each other to advance the ability to catch a criminal.  

While the LexisNexis Law Enforcement Community for Accurint users is a extremely gated community (a fortress in fact) that is available only to badged officials who have already been pre-screened users of the Accurint Law Enforcement tool, I can share information about this site as we tackled a number of challenging issues in its social design such as confidentiality, engaging nontraditional social media users, and designing for professionals with little time. (Accurint is an online search tool to help Law Enforcement find critical data about criminals.  This tool makes the crime fighting software we see on the cop TV shows look like child's play!)  The community launched this week and all I can say is "Criminals, beware! The world is a safer place now due to social media."

 

The LexisNexis Law Enforcement Community was created to connect the power of the collected wisdom of national Law Enforcement - to allow those men and women in blue who are dedicated to keeping us safe - to share information with each other.  In the past, Law Enforcement typically collaborated with their local peers and experts.  But oftentimes, cross-jurisdictional information is critical to catch a criminal as bad guys do know how to travel. (As an aside, I learned through this project an interesting fact: that crime waves typically move west to east.) Often, a gang will send a gang member to a new city to set up a post, recruit new gang members and start to establish their territory.  

In the past, when a Law Enforcement group first saw a crime wave, for example suspicious potential gang activity, it could take weeks or months to identify the gang operations and identify them with predictability.  Now, through this new community, Law Enforcement is able to share information about key activities and tap into the wisdom of experts. They can share, for example, photos of gang identifiers and tattoos and even participate in a dedicated group for gang management.  One of the more unique aspects of this community is that the exchanges need to be limited to discussions of best practice and past experiences as Law Enforcement can never share information about a current or open crime online.  As all exchanges are subject to discovery, they refrain from message posting about anything related to a current case.  (This applies to other fields as well. Medical professionals can discuss general facts about a patient in hopes of best treatment. Marketing professionals share strategy and operations ideas, and the list goes on.)  This is unlike almost any other professional network where the nature of the collaboration is typically about the here-and-now. But, as the past does tend to dictate the future, lessons learned and expert experiences can make all the difference when brainstorming and trying to close a case.

This is one of many powerful examples of how the community is working to make the world a better place. There is a place for all types of crime fighting resources on the Law Enforcement Community: sexual predator information, policing tactics, information about new technology, investigation best practice, Amber Alert support information. All are being share virtually.  As a result, our Law Enforcement superheroes are now constantly connected and collaborating as one giant force.

Law Enforcement using social networking? While that may seem unlikely, this community was shaped directly in response to the needs of Law Enforcement as something that could be deeply useful to them as long as it was clearly secure and only accessible by validated law enforcement professionals. Therefore, this community can be found only through Accurint. The challenges we faced when defining this online community were numerous.  First, we needed to create a customized experience that would benefit Law Enforcement collaboration while maintaining the ability for undercover agents to use the system, with our knowledge so we can serve their needs, while remaining, well, under cover.  Second, much of the law enforcement peer exchange is so highly confidential that it needs to happen in-person or by protected phone lines.  However, officials needed the ability to contact each other and arrange confidential settings for information exchange so we included a secure instant message system so they can make connection arrangements.  Third, we needed the ability for members to be able to clearly identify experienced experts so the membership profile information was highly adapted to be able to display demarcations of experiences such as length of service, awards and other indications of trust. And fourth, we needed to design the site in a way that would accommodate their fast information access needs to include significant ease of use. The site, now in its early beta period, has been very well received largely due to the attention that was paid to servicing their unique needs.

It is with great honor that I, with my team at Leader Networks have been able to guide the strategy and operations for this site for our client LexisNexis Government Services.  I know I sleep more safely at night now that this community exists. While chances are you are not a law enforcement professional, please help spread the word so that cops, FBI etc.  learn, join and benefit from it!

Social Media=Organizational Change!

Online communities are not neutral.  They fundamentally change the nature and way a company does business.  All too often, an organization creates a social strategy and thinks nothing will be altered but the tools they will use.  And then .... the change hits the fan and they are left trying to react to the impact.

When launching a social media strategy it is so important that companies take a hard look at what the social footprint will do to their operations.  Are you ready and prepared to let customers roam, metaphorically, through your building and make contributions and suggestions? Are you prepared to become responsive to customers at the times they want to engage?  If your company's customer care processes are not up to snuff then you are not ready for a social media strategy just yet.  You need to clean up your house before company comes to visit.  If you are not skilled at taking input from customers then social media will only illuminate your flaws -shining a spotlight on them in a public way.

That being said, many companies don't have the option of remaining silent.  Take Toyota for example:  They are being talked about in all four corners of the world every day lately with vigor and emotion.  They can choose to respond and react, or they can just let it happen and hope it goes away.  But it won't, so they need to participate.

So, before you put time and effort into creating a digital community- be it a private community where members need to log in to access information and exchange ideas, or whether you plan to use the open web to engage via Facebook, LinkedIn Groups, Twitter or Bebo, be sure you have a plan for what you will do with the information exchange, who is responsible for interactions, where the information gathered socially will be recorded or captured, and how you will parse the wheat from the chaff.When companies first start to engage online they tend to treat all information as equal, but that is not the best practice. Figuring out the best ways to respond and leverage information gathered through the social channel is often a matter of adopting new practices within the organization. Here are 5 key points to consider:

1. Examine the source of information:  are they a client, prospect or influencer in the market? If there is no way to tell within your current CRM system - there is a need to reevaluate how data are being captured especially in B2B industries where clients often represent significant revenue streams.
   
2. Identify a group or staff responsible for timely response and arm them with proper training and messaging to ensure responsible and consistent replies.
   
3. Gather that which is relevant in a monthly or weekly report that identifies trends and "hot button" items and distribute it across the value chain (for example, if the social channel repeatedly identifies a topic for consideration or change, it might be worthwhile to pay attention).
   
4. Determine the areas that need redress and create a longer term plan of action.  For example, is there is a trend of dissatisfaction around a certain feature of a software platform, or if pricing is a trending issue, consider putting the issue on a working plan.
   
5. Proactively use the social channel to communicate future plans and message to the market potential outcomes of the feedback or idea generation.Discussion group / forum posts, thought leadership blogs and video are all potentially good ways to engage.

A 4 Stage Model for Member Engagement

“If you build it, he will come.” – Field of Dreams

If only this were true for any kind of online community. However, waiting for new members to show up and engage at your site will only rarely succeed. Creating a successful, vibrant online community – especially for an audience of busy professionals – requires a thoughtful, active approach to attracting, inviting, involving, maintaining and retaining members. The umbrella term to describe the process of acquiring and sustaining participation by members in an online community is member engagement.

From a strategic point of view, member engagement is much more than a numbers game based on visitors, visits and page views. The value of a professional community depends upon the quality of the information shared and the strength of the connections created between members, as well as the quantity of these activities. High-quality online collaboration requires regular outreach to new members, encouragement of current members, and reconnection efforts with inactive users to stimulate visits, participation and continuing engagement with other members of the community.

Encouraging collaboration and participation is not a one-time startup activity, but an ongoing process, one that is primarily concerned with building and sustaining user behaviors and interactions. Along with pure activity measures and measures customer and member satisfaction, member engagement is a key metric for site success.

Each member of an online community or professional network participates in the community or network at one of four stages of activity: being online, doing online, acting online and finally, thinking online. Each of these stages represents a greater level of member participation, involvement with community content and, especially, with other members.


Here is a Four-Stage Engagement Model for Online Community which simplifies the member engagement process. Rather than trying to craft communications and incentives for individual members, or using a single, standard approach for all members, the model helps group leaders and community managers categorize their memberships and create a package of communications and activities tailored to each stage.

Stage 1: Being Online

Characteristics:  Members who are new to the online community or are infrequent participants. They may be hesitant to visit or contribute. They may feel unsure about the technology or uncertain about community expectations. They need training, support resources, mentors and models to follow.

Engagement resources: Launch guides, welcome kits, “official greeters”, suggested content resources.

Stage 2: Doing Online

 Characteristics: Members who are somewhat invested in the community with limited contributions and member connections online. Members who visit occasionally and primarily interact with existing content. They rarely post documents or make comments. They are consuming but not making significant contributions to the community. A goal for this member stage is expand their participation into new or unfamiliar areas. They need encouragement to increase participation and experiment.

Engagement resources: Basic user recognition incentives and rewards; best-practice examples to support more participation and experimentation; receive mentor-ship experiences.

Stage 3: Acting Online

 Characteristics: Members who are invested in the community, and who have a growing list of contributions and member connections. They are active, make frequent contributions; create new discussions, request subgroups, offer help and support when asked; undertake experiments with ways to use the community toolsets.

Engagement resources: Encourage member-to-member support and leadership; intermediate member recognition incentives and rewards; best practice contributors.

Stage 4: Thinking Online

Characteristics: Members who are persistently active in the community and in contributing to its success over time.  Enablement for increasing participation for the community's most active and engaged members. They are the problem-solvers and inventors of new discussions and contributions or uses for tools. They are also the most invested in the community based both on successful outcomes and well-established connections with other members.

Engagement resources: Leadership and governance opportunities; advisory board members; best practice award recipients; advanced member recognition incentives and rewards including site performance metrics; mentors.

At each stage, different tools and techniques can capture the member’s attention and support or sustain their current activity, and encourage participation at the next level of involvement. The end state is a member who is active and very involved with the community, who visits regularly, makes useful contributions, collaborates widely, establishes multiple connections and offers help and guidance to other members. This member is a “model” participant, a mentor to others and, perhaps without realizing it, is a recognized leader within the community. No all member will progress through the cycles to stage 4.  Many will remain at stage 2 or stage 3 and that is OK - as with any group (online or offline)  not all members become community leaders. The goal is to create and increase opportunities for member engagement, and to help members succeed in their experience at every stage.