Delegate

A danger in any online community presence is that the life and soul of the site is due almost entirely to the energy and drive of the community manager.  This is normally the case in the early stages of creating and populating the site, but this should be rectified as the site evolves.  If the community manager continues to carry sole responsibility for the site, and then for some reason becomes unavailable to continue in this capacity, the site activity can drop off dramatically and the site can then become a very ineffective and wasted resource.

Community managers should make sure they have plenty of help by using the skills of other community members as page editors and even train another very active member of the community as a back up community manager -  this also ensures that the overall philosophy of the site reflects the views of a broad section of the community, and gives the community members more of a sense of ownership.

Stimulate activity - by example

There will be occasions where activity may be slow or non-existent in your professional community, subsequently reflecting a lack of activity on the community site.  It is then up to the community manager(s) to stimulate fresh activity by making maximum use of a number of site management tools available -

• forums
• page polls
• page notices
• by changing content in news and events sections

Periods of community inactivity can also be the time to test community attitudes to future directions, train new page editors or community managers and redesign stale site sections. 

A lack of fresh content injection into web pages is a sign of a lack of productive activity, but don't forget to use the View Site Statistics tool to also check on the amount of activity generated by visitors to the site - if a page or even a whole section is hardly ever visited by community members, then you may wish to reassess its claim to a place on the site. 

Conversely, those pages with the highest level of hits from site visitors are obviously the most valued and well used by your members - this is where your attention should be focused, and probably the best place for information gathering and feedback via polls and page notices, etc.

Don't forget to catch the eye of site visitors via regular changes to the front page format through the Manage Default page tools, using images from seminars, training, etc, or even using images and a short bio in the In the Spotlight section, where you can showcase member achievements or even just a regular bio on community members with their photo.  This will bring a more personal touch to the community feeling of the site, and help members put faces to names, with some interesting information about their lives and careers.