Here’s a great example of a online community that delivers on its business objectives. I just got back from Scandinavia (Denmark) and want to go back after joining CommunityofSweden.com, the community that is part of VisitSweden, the official Swedish tourism site. Community of Sweden, developed by Tommy Sollen, does several things right:
Co-creation: First, Tommy co-created the community with people. He started out with a development blog asking people to share stories and pictures about Sweden — as well as for their ideas on the design of the community.
Design reflects brand: The community was designed to be clean, tidy, bright, positive, warm and friendly — the same feeling people say they get when they visit Sweden.
Photos! The purpose of the community is to inspire people to travel to Sweden. There’s no better way to inspire travel like great photos. The community makes it easy for people to upload and tag photos. I especially like the map feature where you can click on a location and up comes photos tagged with that location. (As well as stories from that area.) The tagging feature also minimizes the back end administrative work.
Board of directors’ fears unfounded: Tommy said that the board’s biggest concern was that people would post negative or inappropriate comments. Since its launch in Nov. 2007 there have been no issues.
Empowered users: the community’s easy-to-use tools allow users to be in control. They can rate content, take down content they might feel is inappropriate or misplace, create profiles, start discussion threads. Everything is published immediately, furthering inspiring trust. And members can create widgets to put on their own blogs and social networks. In other words, the community belongs more to the community than the tourism organization.
Integrated into the tourism Web site: the community is now also part of the official VistSweden Web site, embedding social intelligence into a marketing web site. Embedded reviews and recommendations soon will become a fundamental feature of all web sites. Sweden is ahead.
One interesting factoid about the community: Italians are the most active members.
