Everybody seems to want a”community” today. Media companies are no exception and many are looking to building”communities of content” that allows their fans to interact with and around their content.There’s already a healthy market conversation going on about best practices for building user communities (check out Mzinga’s webinar series), but how are communities focused on content (and not so much on connecting with your friends/co-workers) different? Below are some data from two entertainment-related communities the Cisco Media Solutions Group helped create (no, they aren’t the ones we publicly disclosed: NHL.com and NASCAR.com; this data is from undisclosed deployments). While this”tale” isn’t meant to suggest one community was more successful than the other, they did take very different paths. Community A and B were both built using Cisco’s white-label social networking solution, which allowed the companies to deploy the features they thought most appealing, and in a UI branded by the media company.As you can see from this chart, after the first month Community A’s registered users began to ramp at a faster rate than Community B’s. (Overall content consumption followed a similar trend, but I’m going to focus on registered users since it suggests a higher level of user engagement.)Registered users for Community A dramatically increased by ~35% in Week 8 and never looked back. By the end of three months, Community A had more than 25,000 more registered users than Community B — average number of page views and uniques also began to accelerate Community B’s in a similar timeframe. Why?There were fundamental differences in the experience provided by both communities (outside of the branding and content). Some of those differences included: Community A * Video-centric entertainment experience* Mix of produced and UG content* “œLiberal” moderation policies (System-based obscenity filtering, take-down of offensive contentCommunity B* Text / photo intensive experience, some video later in the deployment* Almost exclusively UGC* “œConservative” moderation policies (All UG content reviewed by human prior to posting; 24+-hour delay in posting)Assuming the content between the two communities was equally compelling to their audiences (big assumption, I know) it would seem to suggest the more open, interactive experience was more compelling to the online audience -after all, that’s the experience users can get on other sites if you don’t provide it to them.Was Community B a failure? No. They consistently added 600-800 registered users a week and generated 4-5x the average number of page views per visit than the previous non-community-enabled version of the site. Community B was able to engage its audience and increase content consumption- just not as much as Community A.What best practices do YOU have that are unique to communities of content? We’d love to hear your perspective.