In Part 1, I presented content- and interaction-oriented factors (triggers, catalysts, lubricants, flows, and containers) as critical elements of a vibrant online community. In this blog entry, I’ll address the people-oriented factors of audience segments and user types.

An audience is the collection of people, whom you want to attract to your online community. Marketers usually segment the “total addressable audience” into smaller subsets of people, who share common demographics or other tangible attributes. Every online community should do the same because as the saying goes, “You can’t please all the people all of the time.” So, you must prioritize and target your efforts toward people, who will most directly or indirectly impact the vibrancy of the community. The segmentation may be done along multiple axes: business size, industry, professional discipline, capability area, influence, etc. This segmentation process can be tricky, which is why I’d recommend an iterative approach that’s done on a 3-6 month cycle. Don’t overanalyze! Start simple with just 1-2 segmentation axes and go from there. Even if you end up with just a handful of “high impact potential” people after the first pass, it’s better to start engaging them than to wait until you have the “right number” of people in an audience segment because that number will likely vary widely based on many factors, some of which are yet unknown to you. Therefore, the sooner you engage, the sooner you can get feedback and gain experience to refine your segmentation process.

Once you’ve established an ongoing interaction model (e.g. weekly concalls, discussion forum) with the core group of “high impact potential” people for your online community, you must start assessing their respective user types because it’s best to have a mixture of people, who can collectively do the following tasks, all of which are essential in achieving a vibrant online community:

• Create or co-create useful content
• Link to or curate content outside of the community
• Answer questions
• Start interesting discussions
• Expose relevant content and people to others
• Link to community content from outside of the community

With the exception of the last bullet, all of these user actions are supported by Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise and can be measured by Telligent Analytics, which formalizes user types into the following 7 classes.

• Influencer: User who is connected to other well-connected users.
• Asker: User who posts questions.
• Answerer: User who replies to questions that are then verified by the respective Askers or a Moderator.
• Connector: Highly connected user who has replied or linked to many other users.
• Originator: User who creates new content.
• Commenter: User who replies or links to content created by others.
• Moderator: User who moderates content created by others.

For more information on user types in Telligent Analytics, go to the product documentation.