Selecting an Online Community Platform
Things to Think About When Making a Technology and Vendor Decision
By Matthew Lees, Vice President and Analyst
October 8, 2009

NETTING IT OUT

Online communities have three intrinsic requirements: members (your customers, prospects, subscribers, readers, fans, employees, etc.), a connection (an interest in your company, products, and/or services), and a technological system to support and enable the connection (the platform). Today's online community platforms come with an impressive, perhaps overwhelming, array of features and capabilities that support these connections and the relationships between you and your customers.

Selecting an online community technology platform is getting more and more challenging. The number of vendors is steadily increasing, meaning that not only is there ample choice, but there are also a great many candidates to look at. And the types of requirements are increasing as well, for example, as integration with business applications and the greater social Web gains in importance, as does the need to determine community ROI.

This report delves into the essential things to think about when choosing an online community platform. Starting with your goals and those of your community members, it goes through the major steps in the evaluation process, discussing key considerations and trade—offs along the way. These include costs, time to launch, feature sets—a prioritized list of which are provided for common community use cases—technology, professional services, and analytics.

INTRODUCTION

Although online communities have been around since the late 1970s (read Usenet), individuals, organizations, and society as a whole—in fact, societies across the globe—are still trying to get a handle on their use and ramifications. Where the social media phenomenon is heading may be unclear, but it is apparent that online communities can serve many positive purposes for both individuals and organizations.

At the top level, all online customer communities serve to strengthen the relationships between members and organizations (and its products and/or services). From a more specific organizational perspective, though, you may be looking to your community to increase brand awareness and loyalty, provide an additional customer service and support channel, connect your partners and service providers, generate awareness for products and services, provide content, spur ideas and innovation, perform market or product-based research, foster collaboration, entertain, and more.

In practice, no community does only one of these things. A customer community built primarily as a service outlet has branding and loyalty aspects as well; a developer community built primarily to foster the exchange of ideas and techniques will inevitably help some people solve problems. Whatever their primary purpose, we see online communities as part of the mix in developing deeper, multi-faceted relationships with customers, in bringing the customer's voice closer to others in the organization, and in learning about the customer's needs.

It is the community platform that supports and enables all this to happen, whether in a standalone environment or as part of a more extensive system. Creating and developing relationships means getting the most out of the technologies you use, which underlies the importance of making a good platform selection.

Challenges in Selecting a Platform

In many ways, selecting such a technology platform is getting tougher and tougher. There are more platforms on the market than ever, many have similarly extensive feature sets, and other companies—such as CRM, search, and eCommerce vendors—are complicating things (and good for them for doing so!) by adding social components to their products.

There are more platforms on the market than ever, many have similarly extensive feature sets, and other companies—such as CRM, search, and eCommerce vendors—are complicating things (and good for them for doing so!) by adding social components to their products.

On the other hand, vendors are specializing in particular use cases and addressing niche markets. This can certainly help narrow the field. But you still need to know what you're after to make a choice that best serves your business and your customers.

Getting to Launch (or Relaunch)

Note that this report is not specifically about the actual steps and important considerations in launching (or relaunching) an online community. Many of those steps overlap with what is discussed here—for example, the focus on identifying business and customer goals—but this report focuses on what goes into selecting a platform and the vendor behind it.

Much of what follows may seemingly be written for organizations that are only now going down the community route. But this report should be equally useful for those who are already using a community platform and are looking to migrate to a different one, for whatever reasons.

Avoiding the "Sure, It Can Do that" Catch

It is the rare software provider—or, to be more accurate, a member of the software provider's sales team—that says "No, our product can't do that."

For example, all community platforms include some type of search functionality. But there is tremendous difference in the search capabilities among these products. We like to see a robust search offering that allows users to search on a variety of relevant parameters—including message content, data type within the community (e.g., forums, blogs, etc.), member, rating, and date range—with the ability to display results based on any of these parameters and to refine searches on the results page. Best yet is when a search API is available to allow content not inside the community to be searched as well.

No platform meets all our exacting search criteria. Some come close; others are miles away.

This is the main reason why we avoid the use of yes/no checklists of requirements. If you go the checklist route, you won't be able to differentiate between good and bad search offerings; just about every platform you look at will receive a "yes" for its "Search" requirement. But six months later, when you're wondering why your customers are frustrated and your community is not getting traction, you'll realize that it's largely because they can't find what they're looking for quickly and easily enough. So make sure you go beyond "yes" or "no," especially when it comes to your important requirements.

There are several other noteworthy requirements and capabilities in addition to search that tend to fall under this "Sure, it can do that…but perhaps not very well" umbrella. These include file sharing, reputation systems, member and group management, moderation workflow, and idea engines. If these are important requirements for your community, pay special attention to these during the evaluation process.

Which Vendors to Look at

Except for Table B at the end of this report, which shows our vendor watch list, we have kept this report devoid of mention of specific platforms, even though some examples could have nicely helped make certain points. If you're not sure where to start identifying potential platforms, or you want to know which companies we've written about and track, here are some suggestions:

• Other Communities. What platforms are used by communities that you'd like to emulate (i.e., what do your competitors use)?

• Search Engines. There's nothing wrong with googling "community platform," perhaps adding in a keyword or two (such as "community platform innovation" or "community platform API set").

• Our Research Library and Watch List. We cover, both formally and informally, over 20 online community platform providers. The customers.com research library contains product reviews and business analyses on many of these companies and their products. You can also see our watch list of these companies on our blog, at http://blogs.customers.com/socialcustomer.

Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms

© 2009 Patricia Seybold Group

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