Vinnie Lauria from Lefora is here to talk about building community around your product (whatever that product is) based on what he's learned from Lefora.   You can see the slides at the bottom of this post.

Lessons Learned:

• Repeatedable/sustainable process was to work with a few core people who would be your customers and work with their ideas prior to going to a wider community for feedback and development
•  Important to iterate quickly, so every new feature gets deployed, gets feedback and then updated over and over very quickly
• If you want a wide user base, send out a survey and share the findings with that same community
• If you want a smaller user base with ongoing engagement, create a list of people that you email every week for transparency and feedback consistently
• Lefora has an active user forum; GetSatisfaction and UserVoice are two other great products
• Found people via Google AdWrods by buying a few adwords and pulling in people; also went out and found people who were running very old forums and emailed them directly to ask for their feedback and to test the platform
• For every 10 people you contact/invite individually you will get about 1 response
• Use Twitter if you're product is already public, you can search on Twitter for people using your product, what they are saying, etc. Or find things people are talking to that are keywords about the problem or sector you are addressing
• Twitter isn't yet saturated so you have about 6 more months to get great feedback and followers before the platform is overrun
• Great to have your own blog about your product because it lets you reach out and comment/join the conversation on other blogs, etc. and link them back to yours - plus creating conversation on your own.
• Face-to-face user testing: ad on Craigslist that we are creating a new product and we want feedback and will give you free pizza and beer and got over a dozen people to show up (posted under gigs)
• Use Bit.ly or other URL shorteners to track where people are clicking on your links (is it getting responses from Twitter or Craigslist, etc.) - can also use the Bit.ly URL by putting a photo in your post or email.
• Mailchimp - newsletter service that makes it easy to write custom newsletters, that you can use for feedback surveys etc. (Also, lots of folks using VerticalResponse)
  
• Putting on webinars is a great way to create valuable content online that's useful and interesting to bring people back to you
• "Share this" and "Add this" are short bits of code you can put in your blog that let readers/website visitors push your content around the web for you - add the "Share this" option in an email (even though they could forward the message) often results in positive results
  
• Providing real opportunities for supporters to help - something people can actually do
• Putting people in a special class (Yelp! Elite as an example) gives some spotlight to super users but also means you can have a productive relationship with ongoing feedback and development input, etc.
• Think about what could be broken out first, like searching on Twitter, that don't require your management, then ask for volunteers for these specific things and have whatever qualificiations.   Then start out small, see if they are able and intersted to continue and then they could start doing more.
  
• GetSatisfaction vs your own feedback tools- independent customer feedback, ideas, complaints, etc. Some companies want to brand the experience of getting feedback, though others like the idea of a neutral third party tool. It's the philosophy from the top, vs one is better in practice than the other.
• Survey response: core group that gets elite status and nearly all of them do because they are enthusiastic about our work; if we send a survey to all of our users you could have less than 10% of responses. It totally depends on the level of engagement of your users.
• Keep your emails short - we all get a lot of emails so keep the message short as it increases the chance that people will read it, they will click on it (limit your links, too!).
• Have a web version of your email newsletters so that people can see previous content or if they prefer viewing it on the web instead of in an email
• Use Twitter to link back to blog posts, to share short bits of data/facts, etc. that can be interesting and linkable
• Create a method to put really important messages on the top of your website - if there is a system-wide or platform-wide message everyone needs to receive, you can put it on the top of the website instead of an email (an optional box - otherwise people will ignore it)
  

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