YouTube. Facebook. MySpace. Wikipedia. There is a revolution taking place in online behavior that is fundamentally reshaping what is required for an engaging, productive, and successful Web site.

An effective site used to be one that had pleasing layout and colors, intuitive navigation, and helpful text and graphics. Those days are gone. Consumers today demand a tailored and interactive experience online, and have little use for one-size-fits-all content. Users expect to do much more than find information online, they expect to interact with others with similar interests and to have an engaging and personalized experience.

Consider how we now shop online — a product at Amazon.com with a five-star user rating commands a higher price than the comparable three-star item — we care what other people think. And engaging in dialogue matters — bloggers are the new generation of press, capable of building buzz around your products or exposing flaws. Whether the online community builds, hurts or ignores your brand has a lot to do with whether or not your organization is contributing to the dialogue. Offering a personalized Web experience and building an online community around your brand is a competitive requirement.

First of all, you need to know your customer base. Defining your customer segments and the material that is most effective for each is the foundation. Then, you need to set up rules defining what content will be delivered to each customer segment online. Each visitor must automatically be associated with a segment in real-time. A user’s segment can be identified explicitly via login, or implicitly by the user’s online behavior and navigation. Web content management tools with personalization capabilities can enable you to set up these targeting rules and then dynamically deliver the right content to the right site visitor.

Building an engaged online community is more art than science. That said, it requires that you offer a foundation of collaborative capabilities such as blogs, wikis and social tagging. Once you have established these capabilities, the resulting online discussions require ongoing monitoring and contribution in order to keep the material fresh and the dialogue helpful.

We all know the online channel is important for branding. But offering a compelling experience online is increasingly required for competitive survival.