Want to build a great community? Take your cues from these guys.

We often spend so much time focusing on the big guys we forget that sometimes the smallest retailers have simply the best ideas. After seeing them speak at our sessions, I’ve spent several months thinking about the ingenuity of retailers like Life is good and Moosejaw, and now I’ve got another company to add to my “do not forget” list: Backcountry.com.

Backcountry.com CIO Kelly Phillips

The site, which attracts avid outdoor enthusiasts, appears similar to other small online retailers at first glance. They’ve got products broken out by category, the ability to shop by brand, a few deals – including free shipping, and a whole slew of fans on Facebook.

But they also have something else: A Leaderboard. What’s a Leaderboard, you ask? (And thank you for asking, by the way.) The page is a complete list of everyone who has contributed content to the company’s website. You’ll see that the current “leader” has posted 171 reviews (of which 263 customers ranked “helpful”), 1383 answers (403 of which were helpful), 60 photos and 21 comments. Contributors can create their profile and even tag products they took with them on certain hiking trips.

Talk about cultivating an authentic community. Anyone who understands technology can tell from the sophistication of the site that the IT department had a huge hand in this. The company creates the ranking using a sophisticated algorithm so its more than 100,000 contributors won’t get frustrated if others try to cheat the system.

So it seemed only fitting that Backcountry.com CIO Kelly Phillips spoke this afternoon at NRFtech to outline why the company spends so many resources – IT and otherwise – building their community and cultivating content. For starters, he said, sometimes the content created by the community far outweighs what the company would come up with on its own.

Case in point: A question posed on the Leaderboard asked about the size of a popular sleeping bag liner. (Good question, since the company didn’t think to list the product’s dimensions on its website – only the weight – and it is hard to tell from the photo.) Simple answer: The condensed liner is in between the size of a Campbell’s soup can and a Nalgene bottle, writes contributor “Kretzky”, and they’ve got the photo to prove it.

Community-generated content is also more credible than company-speak, Phillips said. Several years ago, a customer wrote in to ask if anyone had seen a specific avalanche transceiver break if it was smashed against a cliff. Sure, the company could have responded to say say the product was sturdy, but the customer who responded to the question by saying he broke a few ribs in a fall but that his beacon remained unscratched  – and potentially saved his life – probably wins on the credibility scale, don’t you think?

While there are certainly corporate benefits to thousands of pieces of user-generated content, retailers who build these communities should keep one Golden Rule in mind: ultimately, content is created for the benefit of your customers, not for you. “What you need to ask yourself is, ‘what is this worth to the people who are experiencing it?’” Phillips said. “Once you start asking what it’s going to do for you, you’re sabotaging it.”

And what’s next for Backcountry.com? The company is working on releasing an ultimate gear guide as a wiki, enabling its community to provide information on products. “We want to provide the wiki to our community to allow them to create the content,” Phillips said. “We want to allow the community to provide detailed product information, too.”