Money Can't Buy You Community

These days we all know that communities are the end game for brands and organisations with the multi-faceted value they offer in terms of word-of-mouth, customer intelligence, increased sales and a nice juicy identifiable asset to boot.  But getting them started is not easy.  At one point it was thought that big brands needed to do no more than set up the room, open the door and let the clamouring hoardes pile in.  However, many of those brands flung open their gates to the deafening silence of tumbleweed blowing...

...to the back of their carefully arranged party suites.  As our understanding of consumer dynamics grows we now see there is a great deal more to brands and communities than meets the eye.  For one thing, people are quite happy to set up their own - some of which become stellar-galaxies like MySpace.  A bit like going to a good underground gig instead of a Big-Bud sponsored street party.  But central to the issue is what keeps these communities ticking over and over and over. In asking people to join a community a brand is really saying - 'give us your data' and that's the rub.  These days personal data is a highly prized commodity, especially when aggregated up into multi-numbers. And the trade between an individual and a brand looking to take a peek at that data needs to be handled with care.  In the past, brands have thought that the best way to get a peek at personal info has been cold hard cash or maybe goodies.  But it seems - within the community context - that is not the case, certainly in the long run.  Learning from the really big communities the only way to sustain an exchange of information over time is by offering some sort of social reward. O'Reilly's Nat says here that the enjoyment of creation, the incremental improvement of a user experience or plain old self-interest are good reasons for people to keep on playing and I have written about people just wanting a voice and recognition.  There's also a good page here on wikipedia about why people participate online (via Iain and Faris).  What keeps you coming back for more?

Comments

[Dino]

Great post James.

"These days personal data is a highly prized commodity, especially when aggregated up into multi-numbers."

Another prized item is attention, and as it is in such limited supply people are choosing to allocate it wisely.

[GrahamHill]

James

I think the key thing is the my community : their community divide.

Research and experience both suggest that people keep going back to those communities that are created, operated and populated by people like them (my community), but not to those that are created, operated and populated by people with their own agendas (their community).

Sadly, most company communities fall squarely in the their community camp. This is probably an artifact of the "we are the brand" mentality that still pervades corporate marketing departments.

[BIG SWINGING]

What keeps me coming back for more?

Value, as defined by me the customer.

By the way, that's a world class post title.