10 Rules for Creating Successful Online Communities

by David Coleman

Creating and maintaining a social endeavor is as much art as it is science, and after a decade of working with online communities and social networks, I have come to believe that they can't be managed but only influenced. In many cases, the communities are left to police themselves. A good example of this is the SAP developer community (called the Business Objects Community) with more than 70,000 developers a day participating. One anecdote I heard from a community member concerned a developer who did a rather self-promoting post on a topic in which many in the community were interested. He did not get much response to his post. So he posted it again. This time the community response was some confusion and anger about the post. The third time this developer did his self-promoting post he got blasted by community members and was never seen again.