Ways to build a community that provides high quality comments on a website

You can ask for them

Many bloggers do this.  Community managers – without a site that elicits quality interaction due to its design and features – do, as well.  However, bloggers who are asked to comment tend to expect you to be on their blog, interacting as much as you may like them to be on your’s.  Keeping up with the expectations of all those you individually reach out to in the spirit of “informing” them about your blog/community-ready site can become labor-intensive.

You can control-freak a community

It actually works for some.  Provide clearly stated comment guidelines so users know the rules and what you expect of them. Stress that you’re looking for thoughtful, friendly contributions. Include a lot of do’s in this list, not necessarily a lot of don’t's. Erase all traces of comments that are not perfectly aligned with your thinking – to ensure that you become regarded as either a force to be reckoned with or a control-freak. If the value you offer is great enough, many will actually tolerate control freak-lead online communities.

Provide comment system with tools that inherently encourage value-adding participation.

• Voting buttons, to move best comments up/the less useful comments down – as we see in Quora.
• Grant star commenter status to just a few usual suspects.  Let them know you will do this before you actually do – so you can roll out the starring very gradually.  When site admins highlight regular commenters, it makes these users feel appreciated and motivates other users to want that status too. (Credit: Dino Dogan)
• If you can, recommend your biggest supporters somewhere. Bonus points for doing this somewhere important, such as in LinkedIn, and especially, for doing so before they ask you to. (Credit: Samantha Bangayan)
• Facebook Connect and Google to provide avatars and identities (a tag-line, perhaps) – as we see in third party apps in Facebook, creating sub-communities and enticing us to join by allowing us to pull profile data from LinkedIn and sometimes other intra-network apps.
• Provide the opportunity for users to create profile pages. This allows you and other community members to see a user’s history of activity, bio, and when the profile page has a discrete URL, some may even use it in their about.me, LinkedIn, and other important networks/pages where they can include such profile pages.

Invite experts

Topic authorities  who can be enticed to join your conversation and answer questions get real attention.  If you can seed an online community it with known experts, you not only raise the quality of discussions that they lead, nearly all commenters will tend to bring out their best game, and put more thought into the comments they provide.

Promote users and the very best individual contributions.

Users appreciate recognition for thoughtful and witty contributions. Find a way to showcase such commenters to the community (talk about a user/s comment/s in a follow-up blog post or create a module somewhere that you can update with new comment/user highlights). It will provide motivation to other users and give the community an indication of what you consider quality. When its positive, it always pays to do this publicly, rather than with a personal thank-you email.

I like what Quora is doing, in recognizing community members who provide valuable answers, comments, posts, complete profiles (okay, Quora doesn’t do enough to prompt people to do this, truth be told), and moderation.  Perhaps your favorite Mashable or HuffPost for encouraging our participation. What comment functions or moderation “tone” does your favorite online community provide that inspires you to contribute and keep coming back?

About Saul Fleischman

Working with social web apps developers on getting things made: my role tends to be functionality ideation, user experience, and also, marketing communications and community development.

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