A lot of companies have created great online user communities filled with best practice content, forums and wikis.  But depending on your customer base, it may be difficult to get them to take full advantage of the community.  You might try sending weekly (or bi-weekly or monthly – up to you) digests a la LinkedIn Groups to increase engagement.

As a new user creates their account, let them opt-in to get email notifications.  That way, as there is new activity on the forums or when a new whitepaper is posted, they will be the first to know.

A simple test to see if your buyers are the type to want content to come to their inbox it to check out your FeedBurner stats.  Look at you email subscribers against your RSS subscribers.  (If you have a blog and don’t use FeedBurner, shame on you – it is free and easy to set up).  At ReachForce, we chose not to have the feed via email option because we use the blog to create our newsletter.  When we looked at the number of newsletter subscribers versus RSS subscribers, we were astonished.  We have 20 times more newsletter subscribers than RSS subscribers.  Looks like our buyers prefer us sending content directly to their inboxes, do yours?

Don’t have a user community?  Consider using LinkedIn as one.  With the groups feature you can email the group up to once a week and post discussions and news.  If your customers are already using LinkedIn (and my guess is they are), it will be easier to engage with them on a platform that they are already using.

A user community (whether hosted by you or LinkedIn) is not just a “if you build it, they will come” kind of thing.  You have to have a plan of action to deliver new relevant content and start discussions.  Remember it’s their community so take cues from your customers as to how they want you to interact with them.