When the human resources professional association WorldatWork first launched its online community at the end of April, organization insiders predicted the Web site would reach 1,000 members in a month or two. Instead, they passed that number by the end of the first week.

"This was a great surprise to us," says Ryan Johnson, vice president of publishing and community for WorldatWork. "... My assumption is there was a pent-up need or desire for this and maybe the LinkedIns, the Facebooks, some of the other ones that are out there weren't exactly serving their needs."

What's the difference?

Accessible through the non-profit association's Web site, worldatwork.org, the community has three discussion boards: compensation, benefits and work-life, where members can post their thoughts on a range of topics from pending legislation to the merits of donating vacation time.

Membership is free and it is not necessary to be a member of WorldatWork to join, says Johnson.

The Web site is part of a growing online social networking trend known as a "community of practice," says Dan Mittleman, associate professor in DePaul University's College of Computing and Digital Media, because it's not an in-house network or broadly inclusive social site, but is aimed at people who are bound by shared work practices.

"We're seeing more and more of these. These are taking off," says Mittleman.

WorldatWork has accounts with other well-known social networking sites, but they have their drawbacks, says Johnson.

"What you see on the discussion boards in there is people sort of blatantly advertising," he says. "So what we've decided in our board is we're going to monitor it more closely to make sure people aren't doing things like blatant advertising or recruiting and create a legitimate place for peer-to-peer exchange."

In the compensation business for 30 years, Vita Taylor of Compensation Solutions in Texas is very happy with the caliber of the community.

"The participants that you have involved in this group are people that are making strategy decisions, policy decisions, administrative decisions," she says, "and so you're contacting and connecting with people that are really in charge of the vanguard of benefit administration and strategy."

Usability

WorldatWork took a lesson from other networking sites that are full of repeated basic questions from entry-level employees and created a mechanism that allows senior-level professionals to talk exclusively to other senior-level professionals if they so choose, says Johnson.

Also, participants get to see as much information as they're willing to give. For example, if a member shares their job title, where they're from and a photo, they'll see the same information in others' profiles.

Taylor uses the database of people in her region to sort them by industry and title.

"I can do some pretty targeted connections there as far as trying to connect with people that are within my reach," she says. "The smaller your business is as an independent consultant, the more beneficial this actually is and the more cost-effective it is as far as trying to get business."

Feature full

Other features of the community include a function to monitor topics where you'll be emailed if someone posts on the subject matter, a top contributors box for each section which displays how many times someone has participated in a discussion board, as well as a "recognition room" that shows what designations a person has, how long they've been a member of WorldatWork, articles they've written and other differentiators.

Such applications can help frame a person's comments. For example, if they've posted hundreds of responses (the top contributor had 1,157 at press time) and given dozens of speeches, "boy, that person probably knows what they're talking about," Johnson says.

One recent post deals with real life consequences of the recession: "Currently our group benefits (medical, dental, vision, life, disability) are available to staff who work 30 or more hrs. per week. With the increasing cost of medical, we are considering increasing that eligibility requirement to 35-40 hrs/wk and are interested in what other employers are using as minimum hrs. for eligibility for their benefits."

Networking connections

There are a lot of benefits to a "community of practice" like the one established by WorldatWork, says Mittleman. The knowledge sharing that goes on improves the base of knowledge in the community by being able to transfer relevant information much more freely than traditional formats, he says.

It's also a way to replace the exclusive old-boys network. "You now have a network that everybody can participate in, and in many ways it's a meritocracy," says Mittleman. "It's people that are good at communicating that have something to say becoming well known and valued in the community."

Taylor says she's gotten business through the community, but it's really about making real, meaningful connections with her audience. "I like that I can be a thought leader and be respected in the community globally and contribute to practitioners' decision making," she says. "If it means that they will utilize my services down the road, that's excellent. If it means that I just become better known as a worldwide [expert] on a particular topic, then that's all the better. To me, that's real advertising. That's real content-oriented connections. It's not superficial, it's not dealing with putting ads out there. It is actual real-time content."

Johnson makes one point clear. The WorldatWork community was not designed to compete with the likes of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

"I don't think we can compete with them. What we can offer is something different," he says. "I hope that if the conversation is going to occur, that it's going to occur on our platform. We can decide to not have a platform and watch the conversation occur elsewhere, but we decided to create a platform and watch the conversation occur here."