The value of recommendation

Nice example of the power of recommendation to build a community from Matt Rhodes’ FreshNetworks Blog:

The growth came from the constant and ongoing growth work that the community management team have been doing. But the final push came when another community member picked up on some of this activity and started to talk about our community on another site. We didn’t ask them to do this, they just thought we were offering something of interest to members of a very well read forum in the UK.

The result was immediate and notable. Overnight, our membership base increased five-fold and by the weekend we had a much larger number of members than we might have expected by the end of a full year of the community. And what was perhaps more important is that these new members joined the conversations and discussions on the site. Increasing number of members is fine, but what we really want to do is to increase the value of the community to all members. And this only really happens when people take part.

The pick of community vendors?

This looks useful as a starting place for thinking about proprietary community platforms. Also check out Sift of course! There’s a bigger analysis of using open source software for online communities by IBM, undertaken in 2006, here. There’s also a fun-looking forum on the subject hosted by IBM, though perhaps a tad too techi for me.

My colleague Jeremiah Owyang has spent a whole lot of time in the last 4+ months looking at Community Software platforms from companies like Telligent Systems, Jive Software, Pluck, and Mzinga. The full report is available to Forrester clients or you can pay for it separately.

You can get a lot more detail on Jeremiah’s blog post. He’s going to be one busy boy helping companies make these choices, now that the Wave is out.