FreshNetworks Blog

I’ve got an article over at iMedia Connection today: Getting your online community right from the start.

The article is based on our collective experience at FreshNetworks of building and managing online communities and suggests five ways that we think will help you get your community right from the start.

1. Remember you are building a community - get the social dynamic right before your think ‘online’
2. Start small and build rapidly - people can’t think about lots of issues at once, get a discussion going on a few topics then build rapidly
3. Seed your community first - nobody likes an empty restaurant, make sure there are some people there before you go public
4. Manage as well as moderate the community - to help grow and develop a community is much more than to moderate
5. The community owns the community; you need to be part of it - only the community really owns the community, so the brand needs to be involved

To read more go and check out the article, or look at our previous posts on online communities.

We’ve seen a lot of big brands launching community sites, or adding a social layer to their existing site, over the last 12-18 months. But research out this week suggests that 60% of the US’s largest companies will have an online community by 2010.

A report from Gartner predicts that 60% of the Fortune 1,000 will have an online community by 2010, reflecting the rapid growth in this way of interacting with and building engagement with customers. But this growth will not all be easy, with the same report suggesting that half of these online communities will consider their venture a failure.

Whether these figures turn out to be true or not, I think that we will see a significant growth in the use of online communities among the larger firms, and that some of these communities will not be as successful as the firms hope.

Gartner predict that a significant reason for these communities being less successful will be a lack of flexibility inside the firms to truly take advantage of the benefits these communities can bring. As Adam Sarner from the research firm says:

Companies will be challenged with what applications to use, who ultimately ‘owns’ an application or interaction and the management of socialisation itself, from measuring success and mitigating negative interactions to sourcing and cultural restraints

It is true that firms sometimes need to adapt to take advantage of the benefits an online community can bring. Our experience at FreshNetworks is that the online communities work best when a range of departments and functions are engaged and involved. From any successful online community you can get insight (for the research team), innovations and new ideas (for product development, brand managers or marketing), true stories and experiences from customers (for the PR or communications teams), amplified word of mouth (for the marketing team). The list continues, showing how each different part of an organisation can benefit from the online community.

We often find that it if a firm is ready and able to engage in this way that it can really bring all the advantages it is capable of bringing. Of course getting to this stage takes some time, and it can be best to let the community grow and develop in a particular area first before opening it up across a firm. But the most successful online communities will be those that do open up across the firm; and those that are less successful will  be the ones that never take this step.

Some more reading

• Gartner Challenge: Who’s Listening?
• Social media key to future business success
• Analyst: Half of ’social media campaigns’ will flop
• Analyst: Half of ’social media campaigns’ will flop (Caroline McCarthy/The Social)