Your brand identity is how you see yourself. Your brand perception is how others see you. If you want your brand strategy to be successful, you need to ensure your brand message is consistent.

Your online brand includes a lot more than just your website and logo. It also often includes you and how you behave, your personality and writing style as well as the personality of any community elements within your site will affect your brand.

Different topics carry differing levels of controversy within online communities. Although creating controversy can boost activity levels, you need to ensure that this controversy does not create friction and end up damaging your community.

In order to decide whether it is right for you to ban certain topics, you need to consider the current subject matter of your community.

Research undertaken by Forrester shows that visitors to media websites are demanding community features. Whilst online communities should not simply be tacked onto existing websites for the sake of adding community features, it should be noted that every website can benefit from community elements if correctly implemented. Online communities need time and dedication of they are too succeed, but avoiding community features altogether could result in your site losing its competitive advantage.

Bloggers seem to wrestle with the issue of how often they should be posting. I do not think this is overly important though as for me, quality is always more important that quantity. I think a bigger issue is determining how long a blog post should be.

When I started blogging, I would publish a new post every single day. Before long, this became too much and I began to cut down by posting two or three times per week.

As online communities become more popular, community developers need to deal with a wide variety of people. As a community grows, it will attract people from different backgrounds with different opinions and different values. This is what makes an online community vibrant and should not be discouraged. At the same time, it is likely that you will come across abusive and disrespectful members.