How to drive interaction for online communities?

While "stroking" might work well for the egotists in the group, I feel it only goes so far. If you don't have the viewership, it's rather empty; sort of like mental masturbation.

In order to attract and maintain viewership, the community / site, etc. needs to have a number of traits:

1. A topic area of interest.
   • If the topic targets a rather small or highly select interest group you just will not get a large viewership. Although you might have a high percentage of the small followers.
   • If no one cares about the subject matter, well: garbage in, no pull.
2. A title that creates a draw.
   • While I'm not a believer in hype, a little descriptive sizzle can help attract the early adopters.
3. A plan(s) for the continual addition of content.
   • To attract the early adopters, you need to provide stimulus that will generate dopamine in their brains to allow the reward-motivated behavior revved up.
4. A moderator during the early growth stage.
   • Close monitoring, especially early on, will allow you to pose those stimulating discussions that get the community going and eventually self-functional.
   • The moderator / facilitator can also do the requisite stroking to give the early adopters the needed impetus to contribute as well as promote the topic board.
5. Promotion.
   • Sorry, if you create it they will not just come. Somehow they need to find out about it. Simply said, "Promote, Promote, Promote!"
   • Promotion is different than "hype!" few things in their early stages can live up to the hype and since ultimates are seldom created on release 1.0, considerable bad word-of-mouth can ensue when hype is followed by a severe let down.
6. Great service.
   • The community needs not only to work from a functional standpoint, but some value-added offerings can be a quick way to attract the interested "late majority" and "laggards."

Well, that's my two cents for now. What does the group think?

I agree Cheryl, and I would add that discussing specifics that will lead to success helps get people involved also. Encouraging some discussion of "wins" gets people involved- maybe even more than asking for opinion about difficult situaltions. This is also essentially ego stroking.

I read a great blog post by Alexis Ohanian about how he and his co-founder built the Reddit community, arguably one of the largest, strongest communities on the internet. Interestingly, when they first started out, the vast majority of activity was the two of them posting under different usernames to create the impressoin of activity. It's important for people to see that there are things going on when they join a new community -- if it's a ghost town the first time they visit, people are unlikely to come back. 

Here's the full post. It's a few years old, but definitely worth a read: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest