Engaging with online communities

Online communities are all the rage as a way of reaching consumers, but many companies are confused about what online communities offer them.

An online community must offer something to companies beyond more web page inventory on which to serve ads. If you buy a million page impressions on Facebook or ChefTalk, you do not have an “online community” strategy. An online community in this context  has members who care about each other or at least each other’s opinions, want to contribute to a greater whole and usually have a common interest. A lot of the publicly posted communication will centre around topics (such as parenting skills), rather than being peer to peer (as is the case in social networks).

The large social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Orkut are not communities. They offer advertising inventory (of dubious quality, but that is another topic) which is little different from advertising on AOL channels. Members have little respect for each other (beyond a very small circle of friends): the kind of  comments you see on YouTube about innocuous topics such as classical music are still more hostile than a proper community talking about contentious topics. There is little giving in social networks - it is mostly "me, me, me" ... come to my page, see how great I am, add to my page, play my games, complete my lists. On communities such as Babycentre or Mumsnet (ironically the best communities such as Mumsnet predate the social network craze, are usually based on free or very cheap bulletin board technology, and have been ignored for a long time), the ethos is more about helping, providing advice, building the community.

So what are communities being used for by marketers?

• Emergencies management. Occasional forced interaction. A lot of the "best practice" case studies for online communities centre around using them to deal with crises – the Kryptonite lock case, for example (although the real damage there was done by blogs, not communities; and Kryptonite actually knew about the problem the day it emerged - their response took longer because of practical physical-world issues; and  there are actually not many such examples). Community monitoring can indeed be an early indicator that consumers are unhappy with your product, and the community may be the easiest way to answer these very consumers – more targeted than, say, print or television and less likely to alert all your other customers to the product problem. Fine, but this is a deeply unsatisfying level of engagement with online communities. There is something wrong if the best thing you can think of doing with a supposedly innovative and exciting platform relies on a stream of extraordinary product problems (I say extraordinary because I am talking here about emergencies and not continued harvesting of product problem information, which companies should do as a matter of course in a structured way). Additionally, monitoring communities for product emergencies is not much of a strategy because you can set up such monitoring for free and in less than a day. Create some Google alerts, some RSS feeds, a Netvibes/Google Personalised Homepage with automated searches for various communities and you’re good to go, as they say (if you’re a big spending company, I can set this up for free as some sort of seductive we-want-you-as-our-client gimmick).
• Focus group enhancement. Invisible regular monitoring. Companies spend vast amounts of money on focus groups. They play an important role in market research, but focus groups have weaknesses (you take a group of people who don’t know each other, stick them in an environment that is half classroom and half interrogation room, pay them and ask them for their views on baby oil… it’s a little artificial). What you really want to find out is how consumers think about your product in their everyday lives, but you cannot do that by being a fly on the wall in their homes because, apart from being a little creepy, a six foot fly in a suit on the wall is bound to change the way people act. It’s the Heisenberg uncertainty problem – the very act of measuring something interferes with its natural state. However, with online communities, your measurement goes unnoticed. Community discussion forums record members’ natural interactions and conversations. If you want to know what people are saying about their BMWs when you aren’t shining a light in their face and asking them what kind of animal or which fictional character it would be, look on Bavarian Board or Mboards. Communities can also give you broader knowledge than focus groups, which generally work well when you want to ask questions and even better when you know what questions to ask - rther than when you don't really have specific requirements but want to know your customers better. If you want to know how people in another country live, you could read it in a book (market landscaping), you could ask them (focus groups) or you could live with them (communities). Thus you can find out what cars musicians drive or what music bodybuilders prefer.
• Sponsor contribution. Passive approach. Communities are actually quite amenable to advertising - people are not naive, they know it's your job to advertise stuff, and their job to buy it. They appreciate being asked in advance, showing your recognition of a community as more than another web channel against which to serve ads. The audience may be deeply targeted, perhaps making your advertising more effective, but you won't make your mother proud by reducing communities to another source of advertising inventory, when they could be so much more. You can go beyond just advertising by spending time in the community, talking to moderators and finding out what the community needs. Mothers' communities may need locations for coffee mornings; student communities may need subsidised IT/hosting costs; and so on. Some communities may find free products very appealing - for example pet food, gardening tools or baby care samples.
• Member contribution. Real engagement with the community. This is what you're after (to become the trusted advisor, the SuperModerator, the Gold Advisor or whatever each community calls its most senior, most respected members) and nothing can replace rolling your sleeves up and getting stuck in. Member contribution is where you start to give something back to communities. Now I don’t want to get all weepy and make long speeches about emotional connections, but that is the biggest difference between community involvement and advertising. No longer are you the slightly weird stranger in the neighbourhood giving sweets to children for nefarious purposes. No longer are you the evil imperialistic personification of all that Marx despised. To a rousing yet uplifting cadre of trumpets you walk slowly into the midst of your customers, who welcome you! How much do you think the members of a piano teachers' forum would want to hear from Yamaha piano engineers (not a salesperson trying to sell pianos) when discussing piano tuning, for example? Or the members of a DIY forum want unbiased advice from B&Q employees (actual DIY-toting employees, not the marketing department) about drills. But don’t abuse this privilege. Good advice used to be “if you send in your PR agency for you, they should be honest about who they are”. Now the good advice is, don’t send your PR agency at all. Find employees (real employees, not people in marketing), who love the subject. If you sell cat food, there must be employees who love cats and can string a sentence together who would want to be (or may be already) members of relevant communities. If you run a travel company, you're bound to have employees who love travelling.
  
  

 

So what will you achieve by interacting with communities? This is not about winning advertising industry awards (seemingly the most common metric applied to community strategies) or about creating a viral campaigns (viral campaigns create very low quality engagement - you'll get more effectiveness spending your money on AdSense remnant inventory). However, less obviously, you also should not try to convince people to buy your product, at least not directly. Rather than rush into communities as a fresh way to advertise, stand back and think about what is really going on here - the stuff you hear about this being a unique and really engaging way of meeting your customers is either false (in which case, whatever you do is not very important - you might as well continue with traditional advertising, where you have a century of expertise) or true (in which case, you need to take time out to imagine what that really means, and empathise with the consumer side of that relationship). This is not an evangelical mission - you want to be accepted by the community on their terms, not on yours. The aim is to create loyalty to and respect for  your brand, and make it a trusted and aspirational choice (most recently the type of strategy achieved by Google and Apple's retail stores). For example, say Aquafresh toothpaste. Don't go round communities trying to make people recommend your toothpaste to each other (no one does this in real life anyway). Instead, establish yourself in the relevant communities as a trusted source of dental care information, so that people begin to think of Aquafresh as the most knowledgeable company when it comes to teeth. With some deeply comparative products, such as cars, it is a little more valid to have direct and purchase-orientated goals, but in either case, communities are the ideal platform for creating long-term, deeply entrenched links between a brand and its consumers.