Social media has emerged as a powerful force for brands, both from the perspective of engaging consumers and in the ability for brands to conduct a two way dialogue .
One of the cornerstones of any social media strategy is the use of communities to bring people together either to share ideas or to generate content.
When thinking about a social network though, the question is often asked, should a brand build their own community or take part in an existing community like facebook or myspace…or both
Creating your own social network can help with branding, drive incremental repeat visitation to a brand site, provide a direct channel for customer feedback, and will provide a valuable source of insights into your customer base.
There are a number of white label social networks around that help brands get up and running fairly easily without the need to complex technical builds however, building a community is far from straight forward and requires a clear insight into why you are doing it, the different segments that exist in a community and how and why they would engage. It also requires dedicated resources to support the community, consistent focus and a certain degree of critical mass in order to be successful.
The mainstream social networks (myspace, facebook etc.) also represent viable alternatives to building your own. They are becoming more like media properties in that their main power is the number of eyeballs that they attract, the length of time those eyeballs stay on the site and the level of data that the network has on the individual enabling greater levels of targeting to build community rapidly.
While it would seem that most social media strategies need to incorporate a component of both, I am interested in hearing from brands and agencies that have been involved in attempts to build a community around a brand, either in a third party site or in their own environment to understand what the key learning’s and pitfalls are.
Hey Jenny,
I’ve been working on quite a lot of these types of projects over the past couple of years, and I’d have to say it’s not really a case of technology choice – it’s much more about the value proposition the community has to begin with that’s the overwhelming success determinant. An empty Facebook group is just as empty as one on Ning ;-)
And in many cases, what you think might be a great proposition just doesn’t fly in reality. The best (worst?) recent example is Fast Company magazine who rebuilt their entire site as a social network, only to find no one showed up, leading to a hasty redesign to put the focus back on the content. They would appear to have the perfect demographic around which to build a social network, but my guess is everyone who reads their mag is either too busy or already has their time tied up in existing social networks.
Technology-wise, I think the white-label products like Ning and Kick Apps are fine products that provide a lot of things out of the box for minimal or no investment. The main issue you’d have if you’re building a brand around a white label social network is that you never own the technology, so it’s not a simple case of “selling” the platform if you ever sell the business or merge with someone else. You’re also bound by whatever upgrades the white label solution makes to the functionality, which reduces your ability to be flexible in the longer term.
For bigger projects that require long term flexibility we’ve been building sites for clients using the open source platform Drupal (http://drupality.com.au). As a CMS and social media platform it’s incredibly robust and flexible to build more or less any type of social network you want whilst maintaining all of your content and users from a single source.
To state the bleeding obvious, communities seem to be largely successful when they are centered around a topic or subject of common interest. This can be a short term thing, for example we used Facebook, blogs, and widgets to form a “community” around the Presets and the launch of their single “Talk Like That” – for 6 weeks it was a vibrant community, with participants communicating with either other via a Twitter-like interface embedded into the widget, winning prizes, hunting down clues etc. Now, everyone has moved on. In contrast, we’ve had a “community” of people who raise money for the MS Society by riding the Sydney to Gong ride going for about 4 years – this has grown in size and power from raising $200,000 in it’s first year, to raising $1,999,988 this year and includes all the sub-elements of community, ie. smaller groups and teams, break-out communities, etc. Similarly we’ve recently started a “community” site for Clean Up the World allowing people involved in green clean-up activities globally to link together through a Google maps mashup.
We’ve been watching the British Airways “MetroTwin” community start up pretty closely to see if simply being someone who travels between 2 cities is enough for you to create an affinity to a group of people – given the top ranking reviews of locations have less than 40 votes, it would seem not.
So it would all seem to be about common interest and tools that provide specific ways of interacting with other users around that interest – if these can be done in a “mainstream” social network, it’s easier to get people to cross link to existing profiles, but custom developed communities can work well too.
My 2 cents
Mike
I agree with a lot of what you say Mike, but some of the more inspired social media campaigns from around the world this year have really connected with the essence of online community and stayed there. I consider The Presets a growing worldwide force in music and their global communities do not move on, they should stick around with the appropriate content, or keep using it!
Penetrating the already popular spaces,(MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, and Facebook) is not hard, but with engaging content that people actually all want to interact with is harder.
Blackberry, Apple, Cadbury, 02, Orange, Google, Kimberly Clark, Amazon, UPS, Cancer Research and many other UK-Europe based branded campaigns and mobile apps have done brilliantly this year with SM activities as varied as online balloon races through to useful widgets. White label, mass market label and whatever labels you guys want to give it! Some were created from nothing and very little initial budget.
All had a great creative that might never be repeated. Only enhanced!
What worries me about what is happening with some of what you mention, is that I cannot see complete evidence of apps getting right in front of consumers on their own terms, or measuring their use. So many believe this to be only about critical mass. Perhaps those 40 BA “Metro Twin” votes were quite influential.
The buzz around Twitter is not about sheer quantity, but about a person’s relative influence being quantified. I think niche will become very critical mass!
Branded Utilities have to be a major part of the ongoing conversation, not just passing through. Personally, I think a lot of new SM companies will form or it will become more departmentalized. Recession is perfect timing, because clients are crying out for creative content that can rise with the platforms and become part of the media landscape. I reckon the disciplines of measurement, blogging,PR,video and a whole range of other criteria goes into it.
There are so many saying they understand online community dynamics.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been plugged into them for most of my life and boy, am I still learning!
BTW – Happy Christmas and Prosperous New Year to all.
Thanks for raising the issue of online branded communities.
A study by Beeline Labs in late 08 identified that many organisations that had built their own online communities were not getting the value they had liked from them. Key areas identified contributing to that were: lack of clear objectives for the site, lack of good community manager on the site and a built it ‘they will come’ attitude.
Our organisation works in the space of online communties but these are short-term market research communities with clear objectives around collaboration on product dev, communication and ad testing, creative concept insights etc… and of course dedicated online community research manager.
I think there will be a place for online branded communities but many organisations are not willing to invest the time and ongoing costs to run them successfully and get those tangible results that they need.
Cheers