Online customer forums and communities are exceedingly powerful tools for building customer loyalty and increasing the long term return on investment (or lifetime value) of each customer.

They are also often misused and neglected because it takes a commitment of time to keep them under control, and make the user supplied content free of spam, and replete with value for participants.

The technical aspects of creating and running an online forum are not challenging, since there are various opensource, free or low cost software packages that can run on a web server. Making the community dynamic is a completely different challenge, but at least it doesn’t require advanced technical knowledge

The Customer Community and Forum Library

I’ve curated a number of articles on the nature of customer communities, and suggestions on how to make them work. Whether you are new to communities online, or more experienced, you’ll be sure to benefit from the articles annotated below.

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