I’ve written before about successful community building, especially in the B2B space. Whether you believe that “communities will transform most business processes” (slide 23) or whether you have more modest expectations, most of us are interested in what makes communities work and why they fail. The study has some interesting data on those two subjects.
Talking about the dynamics of communities they point out that the more content you have the more members you will attract and the more members you attract the more content you will get. That’s a really virtuous circle! To be more specific they identified the three most powerful
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Don’t overlook the importance of people helping other people. I keep running across that issue as people talk about product and experience ratings. They really want to tell others about wonderful products or services and to keep them from making mistakes they’ve made. Harness that desire to help! I’d also point out that there are two sides to that coin. A hot issue draws a lot of attention and it may be hard to make yourself heard. When I first started a green building blog, there wasn’t a lot of Web 2.0 type of activity. In three years, that’s changed and you have to be really clear about where you can make a contribution and where you need to leave it to the experts. That’s fine; you just need to understand your own role.
The other side of the coin, of course, is what causes communities to fail. Note that lack of awareness isn’t number one, although it’s
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Dion Hinchcliffe has some compelling thoughts on what makes communities work on his ZDNet blog. He starts with keeping the needs of the community (not the marketer!) paramount—surprise, surprise—and continues with other good insights. If you want more thoughts on strategy, check out the best practices slideshow posted by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester back in the spring.
And remember, there’s no technological substitute for thoughtful and skilled human attention!
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