With Ideas communities we often see a massive first day spike. This might be driven by your marketing efforts, press coverage, or simply the pent up demand to share ideas. You'll want to be prepared with trained moderators and a communication plan in place. You want to show customers and employees your listening right off the bat.

Over time the community will settle into a steady state, which is perfectly natural. It's hard to keep up the launch momentum. For example on the IdeaExchange today we got 10 new ideas and 30 comments which is well off our peak but still a healthy stream of innovation. 

If you continue to market the community and deliver on ideas you should see steady growth. After all you're content is growing as are your registered users. On the flip side if you neglect your community and appears that no one is listening you will probably see traffic die off.

Often times companies want to figure out how to make a disruptive shift and raise the baseline. There might be a new feature which improves the stickiness or viral nature of the site, but better yet, think about what new communities you might be able to create? Is there a different audience you can tap into or a new conversation you can spark. 

Here's an overview of the process behind managing an online community, from launch through implementation of top ideas.

Typically we'll find an executive sponsor who decides the organization needs an application like this to help them become a more responsive, innovative company. The implementation process can be very fast, because it is often a greenfield. You need to think about what you want to accomplish, and who you need to involve. You need to customize the application to match your website and create a back end process for managing ideas.

When you launch your community, you might open it up to employees or customers and partners. You can start simple, but we also support the ability to create lots of communities for different topics, departments, or customer segments.

I'm often asked, how many people do you need to successfully moderate an Ideas community? The answer is obviously depend on the size of your community but here is some guidance to get you started.

Executive Sponsor: Having an strong Executive Sponsor is critical to the success of an Ideas community because it often represents a significant cultural shift. The Executive Sponsor will help define the goals of the community and appoint a team to lead the initiative. They'll provide the feedback to the project team and rally the support of employees and other executives.

Project Manager: The project manager creates the playbook and guides the team through the implementation process. They'll create dashboards, conduct monthly or quarterly review of new ideas, and coordinate follow up. This individual might also be responsible for training business owners how to best leverage the community. In the first 30 days this might be a full time job, but over time it should be a shared resource.

Product Marketing: This individual helps coordinates product marketing efforts around the community to help drive participation. They might also be responsible for communicating wins (ideas that are being delivered) through a blog or the Ideas in Action app. This can be a shared resource.

Moderators: These individuals are in charge of maintaining data quality and ensuring a healthy conversation. There is no magic number but if you tasked your moderator with reading every post, I'd guess a moderator could get through 200-500 new comments/ideas a day. While that might seem like a lot, most won't posts require any action. Because users are logged in the conversation is typically pretty healthy and often doesn't require moderation. So to figure out how many moderators you need, estimate your daily volume and divide by 200. My guess is the for the vast majority of companies moderation is probably a part time job.

Ambassadors: If you read the BusinessWeek article, it sighted that Starbucks has 48 specifically trained employees who act as hosts of the discussions. As Chris Bruzzo says, "These are the people at a dinner party who make sure everyone is having a good time." These individuals probably aren't full time moderators, but rather product managers from all different areas of the business who can respond to customers, ask questions, and put ideas into action. This might represent 5% of of their job, similar to time spent running focus groups or surveys. I often suggest that you have at least one Ambassador for each of category on your site.

UPDATE: Also See... Moderating an Ideas Community 8/20/2008