Category — Polls

I’ve been reading several articles advising me to get involved in forums, post comments on other blogs, in order to create community around a blog or brand. Facebook even rates the quality of your page on how many interactions it sees on average over the course of the week.

This raises some questions for me.

• How do you make polls, forums, and other forms of community interaction work?
• How do you make community interaction relevant to your organization, blog, or website?
• When is community interaction actually useful?

I have been commissioned to design an information dashboard for Commonwealth North. I’ve seen other organizations use them, and seen plenty of good, Tufte-compliant designs (namely Google Analytics).

• Do you use a dashboard at your organization?
• What does it looks like?
• What kind of data do you need to measure?
• What software package do you use (e.g. Excel, something proprietary, etc.)?

I am thinking about adding either Google’s Friend Connect or Facebook Connect as an option for people leaving comments on this blog. Either technology gives me what I’m looking for: a way for people to “join” a community without having to remember another password. The problem lies in not knowing which audience I’m doing a disservice to if I adopt one over the other.

Help me figure out which one you would use.