In the Dreamforce session “How to Build Online Community” there was some fantastic Q&A. Since most people don’t have time to watch the hour long video I thought I’d highlight a few of the responses.

Original Question from the Audience

We are looking for a place where customers can post ideas and other folks can comment and collaborate on those ideas. Is a blog a good place to get started or are there other technologies such as message boards which would be more appropriate?

Michael Sippey (VP of Products at TypePad) 22 min

There are hosted message board solutions, which give you threaded discussions. A lot of the system can be difficult to brand and adapt to your look and feel.

What we’ve seen some folks do with blogs is they’ll have someone who is the blog moderator and they’ll start conversations.  

It brings up a key point. If you just open up and expect your customers to contribute without helping them along the way, and encouraging dialog, and encouraging conversation, and being the liaison, you’ll end up with a ghost town, and crickets chirping on your message boards.

What we’ve seen some customers do is start a blog, have a marketing manager or a product manager kickoff conversations, and have people comment on those, and then they’ll open up a thread that’s always on the front page of the site that says if you have ideas for things you think we should be talking about here, leave a comment to this post. And they’ll pin that post to the top of the blog or add a link in the sidebar, so that people who want to kickoff conversations can leave ideas starters in that particular post and it’s a great way to get those pieces moving, and when Salesforce launches the Ideas Platform it’ll be a great way to integrate back into the blog.