Common mistakes made when building a community: platform selection

I come across clients regularly who have experienced the same pitfalls when it comes to building communities and developing social media spaces. There are some key questions to ask when selecting a vendor to assist you in building a community. I am going to go through a series of these questions over the next couple of weeks. The first question I wanted to discuss is platform selection. This is an area where large companies in particular have serious issues. I have one multi-national client that changed vendor half way through the project lifecycle because of disagreement on platform selection. I have included a number of criteria below for the

Pricing – there are both open source (free) and proprietary alternatives when selecting a platform. The likes of Lithium, Jive and Telligent require substantial investment with minimum costs of £50K – £100K. There are many less well known proprietary platforms and tools e.g. BuddyPress which is a flavour of WordPress the open source platform. Some vendors have agreements with proprietary softwareware companies and earn a commission fee on implementation of a platform on site. Ensure that the cost of a tool 

equal or surpass the benefits and ask your vendor what alternatives they suggest as viable platforms. 

Scalability – Some opensource platforms are very scalable however not all were built or tested for large volumes of concurrent users. Ensure that you have specified the volume of user traffic in your technical requirements at the start of your project. This will ensure that your vendor is accountable for selecting the appropriate tool. Don't be fooled into thinking that scalable equals expensive. If you are taking care of the hardware/hosting requirements then number of users does not have to be linked to price.

Adaptability – This is an important feature to consider when selecting a platform. What level of customisation does the platform allow and how easy is it for your team to implement custom changes. Most proprietary tools allow you to build your site using drag and drop functionality which is a great cost saver when setting up lots of project groups/Communities of practice/discussion groups. You should be aware of what is involved in developing and plugging in a new feature into the platform. As techniques like gamisation develop it is important to be able to distinguish yourself from the crowd and keep up to date with the latest community development techniques.

User experience – There are two key users to consider the administrators that use your community platform everyday and the standard users that visit it. When selecting a platform you should consider what the platform will provide each of these users in terms of benefits and challenges. Some platforms have appauling discussion group interfaces. Others have plugins that can save time when pulling together statistics for management status meetings etc. So I would say consider the daily tasks your users have to do and consider the pros and cons a platform presents in relation to those tasks. Ask yourself how much do those pros/cons cost/save you?

Security – There are some security concerns relating to some of the opensource platforms that tends to turn companies off using them. A good administrator can update and configure an opensource CMS to be secure. The level of security required is dependant on company policy and sensitivity of information stored. It is best to include your IT (security) in the decision.

Integration – Especially when it comes to internal community collaboration projects you should consider how the platform integrates with users existing communication and collaboration tools e.g. Outlook, Messenger, SharePoint, Blackberry etc. If a tool can be integrated into existing work processes the change management piece of work becomes a lot easier to implement.

The above list is not exhaustitive it is a good guide for things you should consider. I generally create a matrix for comparitive analysis highlighting important features for my specific client. I think it is important to touch on this conversation at the beginning of the project and ensure that your vendor is not locked into a single platform or own brand software from which they demand monthly/yearly subscription fees. Then involve all relevant stakeholders in the final decision making process once you have identified your objectives, requirements and budget.

If you would like to have a conversation about anything mentioned in this article then please feel free to tweet me @Hannon.Kieran or email me – Kieran.Hannon@esocialmedia.co.uk. I regularly write articles on technology and social media so watch this space!