No community is an island (unless it's an island community)

Jeremy Baldwin, 07 Jun 2010

It is easy to see why the concept of branded communities is so attractive to marketers. It provides a nice, neat response to the new communications landscape brought about by the social web, where consumers are now fans, customers have become followers and both have become active contributors.

Why create a community?

With community heralded as the answer to building the deeper and more sustained engagement the benefits certainly stack up nicely on paper. Active communities bring finger-on-the-pulse insight into the needs, mood, and sentiment of your audience. They can be a source of new ideas for product and service development, as well as provide instant validation to those offered up by the brand itself. Some are making communities work as a source of leads and referral and many see them as a way of improving customer service efficiency and support through self-service. They certainly give the means to communicate and amplify messaging without reliance on third party media. Happy days.

There is a lot of really positive community activity happening, but in equal measure there are many, all too visible, casualties of those that just haven't got it. So the question is, are these benefits being realised? Is there any best practice to apply?

Best practice?

Two strands of community marketing have evolved:

Getting involved in the existing organic communities created and hosted by their members.

The planned creation of dedicated brand-led communities, hosted by the brand, essentially for the brand.

The first is about mapping what conversations are going on and understanding when the brand has permission to be involved. On the one hand this might just be individuals joining in as active and valued participants of the community, not passive watchers, or worse still hijackers. This cannot be campaigned, neither can you develop a strategy for it: you need to develop a behavioural framework for the brand and its people. On the other it might be feeding these conversations with relevant, compelling content that supports the reason for the community to exist.

This isn't just advertising by other means; it is about developing an ongoing editorial framework and content roadmap.

Developing a dedicated branded community requires a more structured approach. You need to be clear who the members of the community should be. What do they get out of it, and what do you expect them to do in return? Then you can start worrying about where the community exists, and how its members interact.This isn't as simple as just adopting one of the many community platforms that have sprung up and giving one person the job of managing the community.

No community is an island

The key learning is that no community stands alone. They are all connected as are the people within them. A community cannot be manufactured, but you can create the environment (platform+content) for a community to flourish. But this environment should not be seen as an end in itself.

The community should be seen as the end result of a structured framework for thinking about the market, a set of behaviours that define the brand's actions and those of its representatives. Certainly those that see community not as a bolt-on, standalone business activity but an integral part of business as usual are enjoying the spoils.

And ROI?

There are many examples where specific objectives and returns from community activity can be cited. As ever, what is really needed is a clear metric and method for assessing the total value a brand creates through its community. The notion of 'social currency' is starting to make some in roads here and is an area to watch closely.

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