Gartner's provocative prediction earlier this year says that 80% of social business initiatives, including communities, will not reach their potential by 2015.

While there are many reasons for these failures – such as lack of executive engagement/sponsorship, managerial commitment, and connection to business process – there are ways to turn these failures into wins. Here are three distinct keys to making business communties work for your brand.

1. Forget the Launch...At Least at First

When a new technology gets introduced into a company, the IT department gets it ready for launch, sends user communications, conducts training, and slips into a supporting role. While this works for standalone software, it falls apart with systems that depend on user adoption – systems that get better the more they are used.  A launch may actually do more harm than good.

When getting people to use any product, you’re changing their behaviors and deeply rooted habits. To change habits of your users, you need to create an environment where the benefits are clearly seen and experienced – an environment where a user can have an “A-ha moment,” as Rachel Happe calls it. When you try to be everything to everyone, the A-ha moment is harder to experience. This is why the best launch strategy is to start small, build up the value and energize participation, make it easy to try and say “A-ha” and let it fan out from there. This is not to say that you won’t do a big, exciting event – it just won’t be the beginning or the end; rather a celebration to top off great fundamentals.

2. Develop Use Cases

Use cases are initial examples – microcosms of the larger community, working models of what a full-fledged community would be like. They are living, breathing examples of what to do and how to do it, which influence a newcomer to join and participate in these ways:

• Show, don’t tell how the community could help meet user goals
• Help create A-ha moments by shortening and strengthening the feedback loop between the new user’s action and community’s response

Not all use cases are created equal. If your goals are to show, don’t tell and create A-ha moments, what you’re doing must be highly visible, impactful and accessible. Great use cases are:

• Observable: Your use cases should be public initiatives that impact large groups of people. 
• Impactful: Unless you want the initiative to be stuck in a silo or thought of as “social for the sake of social,” you need to prove business value. The best way to do that is to impact an initiative that’s important to the business.
• Cross functional: While you want the depth and focus to make an impact, try to be as cross-functional as possible. Exposing various groups to the use case, while making them stakeholders, will ensure the fastest viral growth.
• Magnetic: In their research paper, Successful Social Strategy Builds in and on Community from the Beginning, Gartner introduces the concept of magnetism, i.e. to what degree will community members coalesce around the purpose of the use case. When developing use cases, it’s just as important to involve community members as execs – only users will know what feels magnetic to them.
• Accessible: How easy is it to participate in the community? To really make change stick, the user must experience the A-ha moment. Make the use case accessible – physically and mentally so that you can draw people in.
• Easy to implement: While you want to think big, you shouldn’t attempt a sweeping change from the onset – it’s a surefire way to alienate people. Don’t spend months planning out the perfect and complex use case, only to have people arrive at it and give up because it’s too hard. With a simple use case, you can get more participation, delivering small wins, which will energize the onlookers. Besides, starting small lets you course correct along the way. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

3. Start Small

In addition to growing engagement and adoption, there are a whole slew of tremendous benefits to starting small:

• Work out the kinks: You can do all the planning you want, but you won’t know exactly what happens until people start using your community. With a small – yet representative – group of people, you can work out all the kinks, flesh out your governance, hone processes, figure out the optimal structure and start moving toward programming. Anticipate what may happen, and verify through experience.
• Verify hypothesis: While you will have hypotheses about what users want, and have identified key goals prior to embarking on your community adventure, the best way to actually test your hypothesis is to start doing it!
• Inspire evangelism: People won’t adopt a collaborative tool without social proof from their peers – they need to know that it worked for people like them, and for people they respect. Your early users will act as natural evangelists, energizing their coworkers to come work with them on their projects and across teams – that’s virality.
• Create culture: Every community has a culture – culture is what informs your actions when you don’t know what to do. Culture is made up of member behaviors over time, and existing members influence behavior norms for future members to come. When you start small, the early culture has an opportunity to congeal, and the community’s champions act as demonstrable examples of what to do.
• Build trust: Trust is important to working together. John Hagel talks here about trust-based relationships as a key ingredient to building knowledge flows (sharing knowledge) vs. knowledge stocks (hoarding knowledge) and extracting tacit knowledge.  If community members don’t trust each other, the community will never go beyond a superficial, tactical use case.

To build healthy, sustainable communities, we need to rethink how we launch. Building it does not guarantee that people will come. What are some ways in which you were able to create A-ha moments for your members? What are some things that you want to try?

You can build successful business communities with Salesforce Chatter. To help you navigate Chatter and build use cases, we created the ENGAGE playbook. Check it out here or at the button below.