Many of our clients come to us with requests to build a social network that will serve a new audience or need that has yet to be touched by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, or any of the many social networks out there. In our experience, tackling something as robust as a social networks is as much about strategic planning as it is about execution. While it is often tempting to begin building the site out of the gate, I’d recommend taking a step back and doing an assessment that asks questions in the following areas:

• Know Your Audience(s): What primary audience groups will you be serving? Research (with the assistance of an interactive agency) these core audience groups and understand how they utilize technology, how they view social networks, and what their potential barriers to adoption might be.

• Understand Your Audience’s Needs: Whether your audience groups are coming to a social community through an emotional connection (sense of belonging) or through a utilitarian function (looking for information), make certain that your site directly addresses these “hooks” so that users will visit your site again and again. Map these hooks to the functionality and design inherent in the site. The great equalizer here that should be explored here is the concept of efficiency. Take an existing task or need in someone’s life and make it easier and you’ll hook them immediately. Great examples of efficiency are present in Plaxo’s Pulse, tripit.com’s “no brainer” planning tool, and Facebook’s Friend Finder. In short, all three of these examples make my life easier my taking disparate information (photos, contact information, events, updates, etc) and aggregating it in a central place. The addition of open source APIs only supports this concept and Google is looking to standardize (via Open Social) the implementation of these APIs.

• Distill Your Message: A critical factor in user adoption is whether or not users “get” your specific angle on social community. Tell me, quickly and succinctly, what you offer me, how it works, what benefits it will bring, and why I should invest my time in it.

• Phase Your Approach: Trying to launch a social community in its entirety is incredibly ambitious. In addition to all of the moving technical pieces, you want to focus your efforts on iterative improvements based on community feedback rather than a “big bang” approach which may or may not resonate with users. Plus, you’ll feel more sane tackling small digestible pieces rather than trying to solve the “big idea” all at once.

• Make User Feedback Part of Your Process: Understanding user’s needs at the outset is one thing. Implementing a social community that accurately fulfills those needs is another. The way you envision a user using the site may be entirely different than what they’d expect when they interact with it. Open up small Beta releases to a trusted user group that will provide you with honest feedback. Take that feedback and improve your site before releasing it to a larger audience.

• Harness the Power of Existing Technologies: This one may seem obvious, but often, the tendency is be be so unique, so different, that it seems borrowing an existing technology is cheating. My belief is that borrowing existing technology is not cheating at all, especially when you come up with ne and creative ways to implement it. In other words, let someone else’s great technological work do the heavy lifting so that you can focus on the business of marketing and creating a great site that will resonate with users. TechCrunch has posted a list of “out of the box” social communities that have pros and cons. Before going down a path of building a completely custom platform, look into the idea of mixing and matching existing platforms to create potential cost savings and efficiencies.

Finally, don’t be rigid in your thinking. You may have a great vision for a social community that you believe will resonate with users. At times, what you think will resonate versus what actually resonates will vary greatly. Don’t be afraid to listen to your end users and change course if necessary.

Peyton Lindley, Interaction Design