Who owns the online community?

The biggest online communities are businesses that tap into people's general or specific interests and offer great value to users and contributors.  In today's world they often do not charge any money for the use of their services, instead making money from selling adverts on their sites or from services sold to premium users or to companies providing add-ons.  Think of Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn for example.

Looking at these communities today, it is hard to think of a future without them, but they face constant pressures not to go the way of previous stars such as MySpace (now growing again slowly), AOL and SecondLife.  For example, Facebook experiences considerable pressure from younger rivals as it tries to maintain growth and the amount of time users spending on the site as noted in this CNBC report on Facebook growth from May 2013; while it is growing fast in emerging markets, there are signs of a loss of interest by users in established markets such as the USA and UK.

These pressures highlight the fact that the communities depend on their users who are free to go elsewhere if something new grabs their attention (for example Tumblr or Pinterest), if the site annoys them (e.g. not addressing privacy concerns) or just if they grow bored with the activity on the site.

Are there ways to combat this and create longer-lasting online communities?

One possibility would be to involve the community itself much more in running and setting the direction for the site.  Could the community actually co-own the service?  A real sense of ownership would increase loyalty and should also ensure that the site develops in ways that the community wants.  But if the online site was run as a business, this would inevitably create tension between the profit-motive of the company running the service and the demands of users.

There are two other drawbacks to the idea of community involvement or co-ownership.  Firstly, most users do not want to get involved.  They want a service, one that is useful and is used by their friends but do not want to spend time or effort on working out how it should be run; if it stops meeting their needs, then they will just go elsewhere.  Secondly, the active members who would be willing to participate in setting direction are not necessarily representative of the majority, let alone new users whom the business might want to attract.

All of these drawbacks can be overcome, in my opinion, (after all, two of them exist in democratic governments) by adhering to three principles

• clarity on the aims of the community and how both the company running it and the users will benefit
• balance of benefits between operator and users with limits on both sides
• realistic controls that meet the long-term objectives and concerns of the users while allowing the business to operate commercially from day-to-day

I am working on building these principles into a new community for the travel industry.  By focusing on a specific part of the travel industry, the community should also cater to a long-term interest that will help the community to survive (as long as it is well-run).  I will share my plans in more detail in future posts.

Maybe you have any experience of building or even just participating in communities that have long-term success in maintaining user commitment or enthusiasm?  If so, it would be great to hear your experiences.

Turning consumption into engagement

Content marketing is nowadays seen as the answer to a marketer's prayers.  Of course, it requires producing a lot of content but there is usually have lots of product information lying around.  It can just be smartened up a little, with a few added images, then posted, tweeted and referred to on Facebook.  Surely that provides content marketing and social media leading to community engagement?

Except that this misses one key element - involving the community.  We may work hard to combine well-worded content and stunning visuals into a mixture of videos, infographics, case studies and webinars; and this can lead to a satisfying number of visitors and clicks.  But how engaged are those reading, watching and listening?

There is a big difference between consumption and engagement, well expressed by Jason Hekl in his rant on engagement.  He proposes the use of the phone to create engagement, and this is a highly effective method.  But it is not the only way.  The principles of a conversation can be used online as well as on the phone.

The first thing is to open a conversation, not just broadcast your message.  So your content must ask questions and have a format for replies (you can comment below!).  It must pause from time to time to allow for questions or observations from the other person (so I will not make this post too long).  Explanations should be followed by questions to check understanding.  You need to find out more about the other person's interests and needs.

These things can be difficult to do face-to-face, and even more difficult over the phone, where you cannot see the person's expression.  Online it is even harder to judge a person's emotions or receptivity but you do have a number of advantages that you can use

• you can plan what you say and what questions to ask
• you can test different ways of saying things and different formats
• you can measure how people find you, what content they read and the time they spend in order to gain clues to their interest 
• you can make yourself known to thousands or millions of people to find those who most want to have a conversation with you

This last point is so vital because you have to be realistic.  Maybe only 1% of people who read your content will want to engage with you but, as I wrote previously, you do not need many conversations to create activity and debate around your products and services).

So I will be happy if any of you let me know - was this post of interest?  Does it match your experience?

I plan to post more about how to measure people's receptivity online - would this be useful or are there other areas we can explore?

Building your community

One of today's greatest marketing challenges is building the community around the company, brand or product that you are marketing. It no longer works to keep your company distant from your customers and expect them to be loyal because of they have purchased from you in the past or because today's products lead the market. Tomorrow's customers will be looking for something else and will want their supplier to listen to their changing requirements and to adapt their products and services accordingly. Good marketers will always have been listening to customers and asking for feedback as they test new ideas. But there is less and less room to hide for companies that do not connect with the market.

Social media provides us with the tools to connect and discuss. But how do we get the enough of our customers and prospects to engage in conversations and to comment on our website, blog, Facebook page or YouTube channel?

The good news is that a small core of followers can make for a lively debate. Ning's recent POV research showed that 20 people engaged in conversation with your company and with each other brings a reasonable level of activity and encourages others to participate more. If you take the rule of thumb that 1% of visitors become engaged advocates, you are looking for 2000 to visit your sites. Of these, 20 will then become excited enough to share regularly their enthusiasm, concerns and suggestions and form the foundations of a lively community.

Of course, you have to demonstrate that you are willing to listen to them and take notice of their views as well as producing content to interest them. But engaging the community feels like an achievable goal for all companies on this basis.