Best Practices for successful online communities:

• Introduce yourself: In many ways relationships in online communities are very similar to real relationships. Thus, as an act of courtesy and etiquette, please do not forget to introduce yourself properly to your members. Do not take for granted that you and your brand/product are already known.
   
• Be simple and intuitive: Make sure the community is simple and intuitive in use.
   
• Be appealing: Provide special, interesting prizes for contributions, ideas, etc. that are related to your brand and/or product, but not accessible to non-members of the community. This can also help to recruit new members of your target group for the community.       
   
• Be attentive & listen carefully: Keep track of the ongoing discussions and topics of interest to detect trends, new developments etc., show interest for your consumers/customers and their contributions, ideas, suggestions etc., take complaints seriously and provide solutions.
   
• Keep community members engaged: Pose new questions, raise ideas, follow up on individual comments, and show and dignify the winners of your idea competitions etc. Do not “force” members to participate in discussions; if a discussion is stuck, try to encourage participation by approaching the subject matter from a different angle.  
   
• Integrate ideas: Integrate your members’ ideas, suggestions and input wherever possible and use the external know-how as an addional company resource.
   
• Be honest and transparent: Show your community members the results of their participation and tell them what has been done with their input (e.g. how have ideas, suggestions etc. been included in the innovation process).
   
• Be up-to-date: Keep your online community, the related Web 2.0 applications and the linkages to social network sites up-to-date.
   
• Don’t overdo: Please keep in mind that online communities are not for advertisement, at least not primarily. Therefore, do not advertise too much within your community.  

The crowd-creation supports you in the execution of all these requirements to ensure that your online community runs and develops successfully.