ITToolbox.com Shares Lessons Learned during Eight Years of Operation

WebKnowHow
Wednesday, August 23, 2006; 06:02 AM

ITtoolbox, an online community enabling professional IT knowledge sharing, celebrates its eighth anniversary and shares lessons learned while building and operating a profitable online community. ITtoolbox has operated as a profitable business since 1999, building a base of more than 500 advertising clients including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP, Dell, and Intel.

By adhering to lessons learned from years of experience, the 50-employee company is on pace to increase revenue by 50% in 2006. The blog program it operates has grown 300% in the last year, reaching more than 720,000 unique visits in the second quarter, and the ITtoolbox Groups program reached new heights of activity as community members exchanged 40 million e-mails in July. The one-year-old, community-edited IT reference guide at ITtoolbox Wiki became one of the most visited parts of the ITtoolbox network.

"The ITtoolbox community has grown organically for eight years and now helps more than 1.5 million unique professionals share knowledge each month," remarked Dan Morrison, ITtoolbox CEO and co-founder. "Since our launch in 1998, we've learned valuable lessons about growing this community and building a profitable advertising business around it -- meeting the needs of both users and advertising partners."

As online communities are increasingly being analyzed for their disruptive media and advertising capabilities, ITtoolbox shares lessons learned from eight years of experimentation, innovation, and success.

Lessons Learned -- Building an Online Community

-- Quality of content: Users will create quality content if doing so helps them meet their needs and if the community platform facilitates it.

-- Moderation: For moderation to be successful, it must further the goals of the community without restricting user passion or ownership. Moderation must be tailored by function, membership, and collaborative tool, i.e., discussion groups should be moderated differently from blogs or a wiki.

-- SEO: Online communities drive search engine optimization, since community-generated content provides volumes of hooks to attract new users through search engines.

-- Competition: Being first to market with your online community trumps added features.

-- Originality: Online communities are unique and cannot be carbon-copied. Community members will shape the community.

-- Innovation: Online communities are young and innovation is accelerating. Don't build a community on top of one tool -- continually incorporate new tools and techniques into your online community to help it better meet the needs of its users and advertisers.

-- Employees: There is not a large market of experienced online community builders. Creating a successful community has no predefined model and will require creative thinking and problem-solving.

Lessons Learned -- Creating Advertising Value Through an Online Community

-- Incorporate standard ad formats: Generate consistent, scalable revenue with advertising that fits into the pre-exiting buying process. Offer standard formats like flash, banners, and e-mail campaigns and ensure they perform as well as campaigns on traditional media sites.

-- Performance is paramount: To sell advertising, demonstrate performance. Communities create high volumes of granular content, allowing for a level of targeting that can drive superior performance while adding value to the user.

-- Advertising must add value to the user: Successful advertisements in an environment of user empowerment are more than simple promotions. They must have value for users so they engage with it and invite it into their experience.

-- Offer unique opportunities: Campaigns can be enhanced by innovative programs that capitalize on the unique characteristics of a particular online community. Seek opportunities that can scale with the community's growth and take advantage of its differences from editorial media, such as sponsored content creation in Wiki, sponsored podcasts, contests for the community, etc.

Additional information about ITtoolbox, including a company timeline highlighting the history of these lessons learned, can be found at http://www.ITtoolbox.com/help/about.asp.