One expert in customer engagement and social media shares his thoughts on the essence behind delivering a top notch online community.
Online communities are hot property at the moment. Where the U.S. has led the way in terms of branded customer communities, Europe has been quick to catch up over the last 12 to 18 months. Many large brands have recognised the value of communities, the real conversations that go on there and the insight that they can get from observing and interacting with their customers in a social context. Popular with FMCG and other B2C firms, online community use is now growing across both B2B and B2C sectors. At FreshNetworks we build communities for brands from global B2B telecommunications firms to niche B2C vitamin supplement companies and even well known holiday providers.
All of these firms are starting to see real benefits, from the kind of innovation and co-creation that Dell see in their IdeaStorm, or that Starbucks get from MyStarbucksIdea, to the insight that P&G gets from its private, invitation-only communities. Brands are benefiting from engaging their consumers in this new, intimate manner and the marketing industry is developing so as to help them to realise this.
There are many people building online research communities at the moment. Whilst some will undoubtedly prove to be a success, there is growing evidence that if you don't get the groundwork right when setting up and running your community, then it might not bring all the benefits you had hoped for. In the summer of 2008, Deloitte and BeeLine Labs released the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study, a survey of 100 firms with online communities, to investigate their experiences and the benefits they had seen. About a third of respondents reported that they were yet to reap the rewards from their online community. Whilst many of the communities investigated were young, our experience at FreshNetworks is that it is during the strategy and early stages of a community that the groundwork for success is firmly laid.
So how do you ensure that your community is a success and that you reap rewards from it? Based on our experience of building and managing online communities across B2B and B2C brands, we think that there are five ways to make sure you get your online community right from the start.
1. Remember you are building a community
An online community is exactly that: a community. You need to get the social dynamic right and make sure that people will want to spend time there. It's no good building a fantastic site that people won't want to visit, or expecting people to spend time online in a place that has nothing for them (or nothing to make them want to return). Before thinking about the 'online' element, you need to work through the 'community' element.
2. Start small and build rapidly
There is nothing worse than being so overwhelmed with choice that you just don't know where to start. Online, you'll find that if you do this, your bounce rate will be large, and you will lose many potential members before they have even had a chance to interact with you. In a community it's important to start off quite focussed. Communities work when there is a shared goal, interest, aim or ambition. Start with a small number of topics to get conversations and interactions working, and then build out from there.
3. Seed your community first
Imagine its a Friday evening and you're looking for somewhere for dinner. You walk past a couple of restaurants. The first has a couple of tables of people busily eating, chatting and drinking, whilst the second is empty. Which would you choose? Nobody likes to be first, and nobody wants to join a community that has no activity. That's why all our communities are seeded with some users first. This is a group of people that you want to be in the community and who are willing to join early to help you to lay the foundations. They know that they are the first in and they know that one of their roles is to start the conversations. You need to work closely with these people -- doing so will mean you have an active and interesting community for others to join.
4. Manage as well as moderate the community
Most people moderate their communities; they should all be managing them too. Moderation is very much a policing role, ensuring that people abide by the rules or guidelines that they agree to as part of the community. Management is more proactive -- managing conversations and members, acting as the party host who makes sure that everybody gets the most out of their time in the community.
5. The community owns the community; you need to be part of it
A true community is one that is really only ever owned by the community. You can't tell it what to do or get involved with it from the outside -- you need to be part of the community too. The brands should be visible and clear in the community; you should be part of it and really enter into a two-way exchange with your customers. Both a community manager -- the party host from the brand -- and staff from across the organisation can contribute to the success of the community. Community members value this direct contact and the feedback that comes from it. Real involvement keeps the community yours and means that you will get the most from it.
Matt Rhodes is head of client services at FreshNetworks.