With community members available at your fingertips 24/7 (and a portion of your budget dedicated to a MROC), it can be tempting to want to launch as many topics relevant to internal customers as possible.  However, it’s critical to balance moderated activities each day/week between topics relevant to your organization and topics relevant to the community members.

This may sound like a fairly obvious tip, but the temptation can be strong.  The risk is higher attrition rates among members, who become frustrated with the lack of attention to their needs and eventually leave.

We recommend trying to keep a 2:1 ratio of company-relevant to member-relevant topics in order to ensure there is sustained interest from community members.  Otherwise, you’ll end up spending more money and time constantly recruiting new members due to high attrition rates.

Just another tip from your friends at PluggedIN.  If you’d like more, check out our paper on “10 Tips for Creating Successful Online Research Communities.” Happy MROC’ing