NETTING IT OUT

Online communities are no longer the domain only of gamers and social activists. Organizations of every type and across every industry, are finding utility in providing communal online spaces for their customers, members, and users. And individuals are increasingly joining these communities, often taking an active role in running them.

Online (customer) communities have three intrinsic requirements: members (your customers and prospects), a connection (an interest in your products and services), and a technology system to support and enable the connection (the platform). Today’s online community software platforms come with an impressive array of features and capabilities.

Selecting an online customer community platform begins with your overall business strategy. As with other system evaluations, the focus should be on the capabilities that support this strategy. But the engine that drives the community is your customers, people that you may be able to influence, but certainly can’t control. So, unlike with other system evaluations, you need to consider the fact that online communities can take on a life of their own.

But have faith in your customers! The companies that can give up some control, that trust the strength of their brands, the excellence and appeal of their products and services, and the loyalty they have developed with their customers, are well suited to leverage what online communities have to offer.

ONLINE COMMUNITY PLATFORMS

Big Changes from 2000 to 2006

In mid-2000 MaMaMedia.com, a Web site and online community of more than four million members at the time, overhauled its message boards. The internally developed system, sophisticated when developed in 1997, was more of a “flat” bulletin board than a multi-level threaded discussion list. Still, it allowed MaMaMedia members, mostly children aged 5-12, to communicate with each other in a safe (i.e., moderated) place. The themed message boards, covering topics such as technology, movies, and games, received thousands of postings each month and were an important part of the MaMaMedia community.

At the time of the Message Boards 2.0 project, I was director of member services and communication; my team managed the upgrade. Knowing how children communicate with each other, having expertise in developing tools that enable the sharing of information and content, and excited about the potential of the boards, we went into the project planning phase with a wish list a mile long.

Our vision was extensive: We wanted a redesigned user interface. We wanted to provide multi-level message threading. We wanted to let members search the message boards. We wanted to feature MaMaMedia avatars (aka “DigSigs”) next to the poster’s screen name. We wanted users to be able to click on a screen name to get to the poster’s member profile (of course, we also would have needed to build the entire member profile system, which didn’t exist at the time, but this was a wish list, after all). And we wanted a few dozen back-end fixes and tweaks to make the system run better.

That was our vision. But what did our resources allow us to do?

Well, we redesigned the new interface, which made the look and feel of each message board fit in better to its themed section of the site. And we implemented most of the back-end fixes.

But the other stuff--the exciting stuff that would have been welcomed by MaMaMedia members (and by MaMaMedia marketing and customer service teams)--would simply have been too expensive or too difficult to build at the time. As it was, the project took upwards of six weeks by the in-house programming team. Sure, the redesign looked great, the message boards ran more quickly, and the moderators and administrators were happy with some of the back-end tweaks, but most of the functionality was unnoticed by members and had a limited impact on MaMaMedia’s competitive advantage.

All of our MaMaMedia wish list capabilities, the ones we dreamed about, scoped, and spec-ed, but in the end deemed too time intensive and costly to build, are fundamental components of today’s online community platforms. The community-enabling features that MaMaMedia, and countless other online communities, didn’t build six years ago are available now practically out of the box from software companies, such as Jive Software, Lithium Technologies, the Ramius Corporation, and others, that saw the potential of online communities and invested heavily in product development.

Online community platforms have come a long way since 2000.

What an Online Community Can Do for Your Customers and You

Although online (or virtual) communities have been around since the late 1970s (read Usenet), such communities are still in their formative years. Individuals, groups, and businesses are still trying to get a handle on their capabilities and their utility. That online communities serve some useful purpose is apparent; where they are heading is less clear.

At the top level, all online customer communities serve to strengthen the relationship between the customer and the company, and its products and services. More specifically, though, you may be looking to your community to increase brand awareness and loyalty, provide an additional customer service outlet, connect your partners and service providers, promote products and services, provide content, prompt innovation, perform market or product-based research, foster collaboration, entertain, and more.

In practice, no community is only one of these things. A customer community built primarily as a service outlet has branding and loyalty aspects as well; a developer community built primarily to foster the exchange of ideas and techniques will inevitably help some people solve problems. Whatever their primary purpose, we see online communities as part of the mix in developing deeper, multi-faceted relationships with customers, in bringing the customer’s voice closer to others in the organization, and in learning about the customer’s needs.

It’s All about Giving Control to Your Customers

The most compelling thing about online communities is that they put the control in the hands of community members. You provide the tools and the members choose when and how to use them. Members can tap into the community and its knowledgebase any time of the day or night, whenever they want or need to. And members can interact with the community in the ways most comfortable or convenient for them, on their own terms. Combine this customer control with vast amounts of information and people wanting to help, and you’ve got an extremely powerful engine of innovation.

Members with problems to solve can start by searching the community knowledgebase (regular Web content, forums, blogs, etc.). If they don’t find quite the right answer, they can post their question to an existing forum thread, or even create a new thread. Or send a message to a designated community expert. Or, depending on the community and the platform, they could initiate a chat session with another member or with a customer service representative. In any case, they are the ones choosing how to interact.

And some members will be actively involved in helping others solve their own problems, building up the knowledgebase, and contributing to the community in general. They can answer questions in forums, respond to blog posts, create their own polls, and even take on leadership roles. Here, too, they are in control.

Start with Your Business Strategy

The starting point is your business strategy as it relates to the problem or opportunity you are addressing. There are plenty of business problems for which an online customer community is not the best solution. But if the approach is to build a community, your goals and community’s goals need to be aligned. You know your business, and you know your customers, their needs, and motivations...