Jim Lynch is Community Manager at ZD Media, overseeing PC Magazine Forums and ExtremeTech. His views on his work and the sector:

Could you describe the online communities across the ZDM network?

We have two communities – PC Magazine’s community and ExtremeTech . We’re interested in building more communities but due to the advertising crunch the industry is in, funding is tight.

What is ZDM’s strategy regarding community?

What we are trying to do on PCMag and ET is to build higher-quality communities than those found in other places. This means that we want to absolutely minimize flaming, bad language, personal attacks, etc. We’ve worked very hard at creating places where our readers can interact without fear of being attacked or ridiculed. We’ve gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback from our readers that these are the kinds of communities that they want. Many people have told us that they don’t usually bother with online message boards because of the nastiness, profanity and general chaos that goes on sometimes but that they love ours because of the high quality interaction we offer.

The real mission of both forums is to provide a place where information-sharing and interaction can occur between our readers, and between our readers and editors. We’ve really got some great people in our forums – extremely knowledgeable users who help each other and who derive a lot of satisfaction from being in a quality community.

I am tremendously proud of how far we’ve come since we launched PCMag and ET’s forums a few months back. ET launched in May and now has more than 51,000 messages already. I used to manage ZDNet’s communities a few years back and things have improved a lot since those days in terms of quality. Both the PCMag and ET forums already have a lot of value to our readers and it’s only been a few months! I can’t wait to see where we are in a few years.

How does online community impact your bottom line?

I think in a general sense it helps by continually bringing people back to our sites on a regular basis even if they’ve already read the most recent articles on the site. As many companies have found out, it’s hard to directly monetize communities. We’ve got ads running in the forums so that’s one way of directly trying to do it. More often the benefits from communities come from maintaining a positive relationship with customers. In our case we get a tremendous amount of feedback about stories from our readers and we use that to fine-tune our content to make sure that we’re giving our readers the information they really want.

Can you name a few things that have worked particularly well for you to this point?

Sure, here are a few:

1. Keep flames, profanity and personal attacks out of the forum. They add nothing to the discussion and chase away lots of people who otherwise would participate. This requires diligent community management. Some sites opt for electronic filtering only and I don’t think that works over time in terms of quality. You have to have real human beings involved to manage the interaction of other human beings.

2. Integrate the community with content as tightly as possible. You’ll see quotes from our users embedded right into the middle of our articles. We don’t shy away from putting up criticism of our content – sometimes quite scathing. We try to make sure our reader’s voices are heard.

3. Pay attention to what the people in your community say. I can’t stress this enough. Sometimes folks in the forums have great feedback about articles or they catch mistakes that we might otherwise miss. We’ve corrected articles and added credits to our readers by name in some of our stories when they’ve caught a mistake. This has the benefit of building a relationship and letting readers know that *their* thoughts really do matter to us.

Whom do you view as your competitors? Do you expect further consolidation in your sector, or are we already down to the “few winners”?

Hmmm…well this is tough. In terms of community there are lots of people out there. But everybody does community a little differently on each site so it’s hard to stack them all up against each other. Certainly sites like Ars Technica (one of my personal favorites) and Maximum PC have very large communities, but I think we take a slightly different approach than they do. As I’ve said before – there’s plenty of room for different kinds of communities in this space and no two communities are alike. Each community has its own flavor and standards. Users will gravitate to the ones that appeal the most to them.

Any thoughts on how community in your sector will look in a couple of years?

Good question. Given how bad the tech sector has been recently, I think it’s only going to get better as time goes on. Tech has been in a rut for a while now and yet communities continue to grow and prosper. As the ad market gets better and everybody’s bottom line gets better I think you will see more sites venturing back into community building.