What does an online community need?

People will participate anyway, but how to make them participate on your online platform for a long period of time?

There are million ways of implementing social network tools for online communities. In most cases they simply don't work. Why?

You need tools and technical infrastructure to make online communication possible and support the online community's interactions with the world. Mind that I'm not talking about high-tech tools or beautiful designs. I'm just saying it should fit the community's needs and wants.

The second aspect you need is social behaviour, which will sustain the community over time. This aspect we can divide into four kinds of social behaviour the online community needs at least to survive.

• People have to manage the tools they are using. Technical management.
• People have to socially manage their online platform to ensure it's safety, peacefulness and open communication.
• People have to exert some kind of external promotion in order to attract new members. 22% of members drop-out of online platforms annually. Butler recommends a annual growth of at least double the drop-out rate in order to sustain an online platform.
• People have to create content and consume it. Attending to and reading messages is a prerequisite for others to provide them. This last social behaviour lies in the heart of active participation.

Thus, you need social behavior and a technical infrastructure on a platform that suits the community. How should this be implemented in a particular platform? That's what my next blogpost is about.