The Benefits of Creating an Online Community - 7Summits Originally posted on the ForeFront Magazine blog. “A new class of company is emerging—one that uses collaborative technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners and suppliers…” This quote from a McKinsey study has always resonated with me as I consider the benefits and impact of social technologies and online communities on the way business is done. In today’s competitive marketplace, companies are working to maximize their opportunities and define the underlying strategy of embracing an online community to connect, engage and extend relationships with customers, employees and partners. From high-tech to higher education, online communities have a strong use case in most verticals, so long as the strategy is driven by the businesses’ objectives and audience needs and aligns with existing businesses processes and systems. What Are the Benefits of an Online Community? Where Should I Start?
Getting Brand Communities Right In 1983, Harley-Davidson faced extinction. Twenty-five years later, the company boasted a top-50 global brand valued at $7.8 billion. Central to the company’s turnaround, and to its subsequent success, was Harley’s commitment to building a brand community: a group of ardent consumers organized around the lifestyle, activities, and ethos of the brand. Inspired by Harley’s results and enabled by Web 2.0 technologies, marketers in industries from packaged goods to industrial equipment are busy trying to build communities around their own brands. On the basis of our combined 30 years of researching, building, and leveraging brand communities, we identify and dispel seven commonly held myths about maximizing their value for a firm. Myth #1 A brand community is a marketing strategy. The Reality A brand community is a business strategy. Too often, companies isolate their community-building efforts within the marketing function. Harley-Davidson provides a quintessential example. Myth #2 Myth #3
A Big Payoff from Online Company Communities Title: Social Dollars: The Economic Impact of Customer Participation in a Firm-Sponsored Online Community Authors: Puneet Manchanda, Grant Packard, and Adithya Pattabhiramaiah (all University of Michigan) Publisher: Ross School of Business Working Paper Date Published: January 2012 Studies show that consumers are spending more of their leisure time online, and U.S. marketers are flocking to third-party social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to reach them. Are these company networks earning their keep? The revenue increase, called “social dollars” in the paper, represents spending that is over and above the members’ purchase history with the firm — and it similarly exceeds the spending of a control group of comparable consumers who did not join the network. This increase in income is “economically significant for the firm as it more than covers the fixed cost of setting up the community as well as the variable cost of operating it,” the authors write.