The Online Community Expert Interview is a monthly series that features Online Community thought leaders driving online community strategy and practice at their companies. This month’s interview features Shawn Morton from CNET.

Shawn’s Bio:
I currently manage a product development team at the Louisville office of CNET Networks. I have been with CNET since 1999. In my current role, I manage all of the product development functions for TechRepublic.com.

I have been working on the web professionally since 1997. I have completed large-scale design, production and/or usability projects for clients including Philips, Office Depot, Best Western Hotels and Kemper Insurance.

I have written over a dozen articles on web development for CNET’s Builder.com and have appeared on NPR’s “State of Affairs” to discuss blogging.

Q: Shawn, You’ve been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and collaboration trends have you seen at your company? What are you doing now, and mostly importantly, what’s working?

A: Wow, I think I’ve seen just about all of trends at some point over the past 8 years – from collaborative desktop apps, to discussion boards, to blogs, to wikis to social news.

In fact, a couple of years ago, TechRepublic pushed out a lot of new features like social bookmarking, member blogs and wikis with the goal of driving increased usage within the community.

In the end, we found that what our members really wanted was for us to focus on improving the features they used the most discussion and technical Q&A. The big lesson from that exercise was to follow the needs of the community first, not the latest new thing that analysts, journalists or bloggers are raving about: unless your community is geared toward analysts, journalists or bloggers.

We also learned that it’s OK to phase out features if they’re not working. In my experience, you need to continuously justify every feature on the site. If something isn’t getting used, it is noise and the more noise you have, the harder it is to clearly articulate your value proposition.

Q: Do you have examples of a few major corporations / sites doing interesting things with online communities? Who are you paying attention to?

I am always trying new services in an effort to stay up-to-date on emerging trends. I’ve probably signed up for 50 or more services over the past couple of years, which I’ll admit is a bit excessive; however, it helps me understand what is possible. Often, it is small things like the registration form on another service that can inspire you to improve your own processes.

In terms of specific sites that I am paying attention to, three sites come to mind immediately: twitter, iLike and CoComment.

I am fascinated with twitter (and a similar site Jaiku) because it is interesting to think about what you can do with this idea of “presence.” Are people really interested in telling their friends what they are doing right at this moment? Obviously, some people are. And since these services can also be used with a mobile phone, the growth opportunities are pretty huge.

Sites such as iLike and CoComment are intriguing because they are building or enhancing community experiences around things that people are doing elsewhere.

iLike takes data from the things you listen to on iTunes and helps you find other people with similar musical tastes as well as other bands that are similar to the bands you listen to. I use it all the time and love how the service gets better as I listen to more music (something I was doing already).

CoComment is similar in that it is taking all of the comments that you post all across the web and bringing them together in a single place. So if you post comments on blogs, on Flickr, in discussion boards or whatever, you can use CoComment to see all of your posts and any follow-up posts from other uses. And because it uses a browser plugin (similar to how iLike uses an iTunes plugin), it happens automatically.

I think services that are able to take things you are already doing and make a new, rich experience out of it are very interesting and I hope to see more of them.

Q: What are areas of growth in corporations in the use of online communities, from an investment, feature, or member growth perspective?

A: I don’t really think of community as a growth area for most sites. People may disagree; however, when you consider that only 1% of people actually participate on the web, it is unrealistic to expect that adding “community” to a site is going to drive huge growth.

Of course, people often want to label the consumption or reading of message boards and forums as “community,” but that’s a stretch in my opinion. I think of community as a group of people who connect online and share information with each other.

I’m sure lots of people will disagree with my definition of community and lump in the “lurkers” or consumers of community content. In that case, depending on what topic your community is focused on, you could see significant growth in page views and unique users who come into your community from search engines. However, those users tend to be lower value because they are looking for a data transaction (they need a specific answer right now), not a community to be a part of. That’s why I don’t like to include them as part of the community.

Q: How do community managers make the ROI case to senior management?

A: I think it depends on how you define community. If you use a more pure definition of community, as I mentioned before, I see community as primarily a loyalty and retention tool where you can engage and satisfy your most passionate customers. Of course, that can be much more difficult to justify to senior management.

If you use a broader definition of community, the increase in page views and unique users will generate more impressions and ad inventory, so the ROI is much easier to calculate.

Q: What should every CEO know about online communities?

A: I think every CEO should know that you have to cater to your existing audience if you want community to work for you. Just trying to copy the latest trend will not get you where you want to go.

I think the sites that decided to copy digg’s voting model are finding that out (or they will very soon) the hard way. digg isn’t successful because of the voting mechanism. They are successful because of the people who they’ve attracted to participate. Adding a voting tool on your site isn’t going to automatically result in the same success.

Community is definitely hot right now; however, it is not for every site and every audience. Nothing looks worse than having a discussion forum with 10 posts in it or social news stories with 5 votes.