Lithium have just released a White Paper entitled, Online Communities: Best Practices and Deployment Tips for Reducing Costs and Increasing Overall Customer Satisfaction.

At a glance it looks like a useful report, with easy to read and use information.

The paper provides 10 tips on what it takes to create on online community:

1. Have a business owner who oversees budget and sets direction.
2. Have a community manager who conducts planning and day-to-day decision-making.
3. Have a moderator who sets tone, enforces rules, and helps users.
4. Define roles for staff and users and configure software appropriately.
5. Create a set of comprehensive guidelines.
6. Define actions that will take place when issues occur.
7. Make community visible to potential users.
8. Create the proper structure and atmosphere to engage users.
9. Manage “superusers” differently from other users.
10. Focus measurement on business value.

All 10 points are valid, and definitely items you’ll need to give serious thought if you hope to build an engaged online community that contributes to your business objectives.

There’s also an explanation of what the business case is for creating an online community:

• Avoided costs
• Customer loyalty
• Customer satisfaction
• Sales

There’s loads more useful information, including expanded info on the points above in the white paper. Head over to CIOWhitepapers to downlaod the Online Community Best Practices White Paper. It’s free, but as usual you’ll need to provide an email address to access it.

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