Guest comment: Choosing a community platform

There is much hype at the moment over social media and online communities.  In fact many of our clients are asking us either how they can use an existing community and social networking site or they want to build their own.  I’m not going to discuss the merits or otherwise of such strategies, or when such strategies are a good idea – there is plenty of discussion on these subjects elsewhere.  But if you’ve decided that you do want to build an online community, what are your options?

First though, what is a community platform?  I would suggest that it’s an online tool that allows different people to come together, build virtual relationships, share information and collaborate.  Being more specific, this is usually a web site where users have a rich profile, can associate themselves with other users (e.g. friends or groups), and has collaborative features such as forums and blog functionality.  Of course, there are many other features on community sites, but these are the core features.

The quickest way to build your own online community is to use an existing site.  By setting up a Facebook group, you can benefit from the features of that site straight away.  And of course, you benefit from a potentially large user-base, meaning you have opportunities for awareness to spread virally.  However, this approach is very constraining for branding and functionality, and won’t be any good for a closed community, unless the site you’ve chosen happens to be restricted to the users you want to access it.

Your next option is to use software as a service.  There are several providers, such as Ning, that provide websites with community functionality which you can pay for as a service.  These typically allow you to brand the site so your users won’t necessarily know who provides the service.  This is great for keeping set-up costs relatively low, as typically you can get away without any development effort.  However, the amount of customisation you can achieve (look and feel as well as functionality) is limited, and to go far outside of what comes as standard could mean asking the service provider to make changes for you, which soon starts to become expensive.

Next, in terms of complexity, is to use an off-the-shelf platform and build a site on top of it.  There are many Content Management System (CMS) applications that have in-built user generated content features such as Drupal, but these are really just CMSs with added features, not true community platforms.  Community platforms are effectively all the building blocks you need to create a community site which you assemble into the community site you want.  Some give you a default site which you can customise, with others you have to build the entire site on top yourself.

Typically these are very flexible and although require a fair amount of development, they already have the key features in place (such as registration, login, rich profiles, user networking, forums and blogs).  At the higher end, products such as IBM Lotus Connections, Jive and Telligent Community are highly robust, scalable and function-rich (for example Telligent powers MySpace) –  but they do have a price tag to match and require quite a lot of development to get going.  Conversely, products such as EPiServer Relate+ provide a good feature set at a lower price-point and can be used almost off the shelf, although in reality you would want to re-skin it at the very least and you’ll probably want to add your own functionality.

To conclude, if you want the ultimate flexibility, you could build your own community platform yourself from scratch.  But I wouldn’t recommend doing that unless you have very specific requirements – why reinvent the wheel when there are so many shapes and sizes out there already.

By Philip Clarke

Head of Technology

e3

www.e3media.co.uk