Online Communities: Let's Go

Photo source: Oriol Salvador on flickr.

The benefits we enjoy from communities have long been known. Teamwork and collaboration within the community gives rise to benefits that we could have never achieved on our own. Today, a revolution in online communities has begun and the benefits are being reaped by organizations every day.

Early online communities, such as MySpace and Facebook, were born to serve a general purpose: broadly participating with others around a shared interest (or relationship). In 2014, however, online communities are not just for social media. More and more organizations are providing customers with a destination to meet and interact in an online, social environment.

These communities and the interactions within them are now helping organizations to further their reach and generate valuable engagement with customers. The following are three organizations that would benefit greatly from providing an online community.

GoPro

Content is the driver of sales and the action sports camera company, GoPro, has some of the best on the planet. GoPro has enabled anyone to take a video camera with them into the harshest environments, such as swell-filled oceans and snow-capped mountains. The content that people churn out is simply stunning.

A surfer films himself dropping in on a 30-foot wave, gets barreled, and maneuvers out the back unscathed, all from the first-person perspective. This feat is extremely difficult to accomplish and, thus, it is a view hardly ever captured. A back-country snowboarder leaps from a helicopter and rockets down the steepest face of the mountain, leaps off a huge cliff, rides it out, and gets a high five from his buddies waiting at the bottom. All captured from an unprecedented point of view.

This is great content! But, where does it go? Yes, some of it is posted to GoPro’s website, but most of it goes to YouTube. Thus, YouTube enjoys most of the quantifiable benefits of the amazing content that GoPro users are creating every day. If GoPro had an online community on their website, with an area for people to contribute original content, I think GoPro users and fans alike would interact and engage with the content and one another in that space.

Now, GoPro would reap the benefit of the content that users generate, not YouTube (of course, they could still embed their YouTube videos in their community). The result would be valuable user engagement directly on the GoPro website, with full ownership of the resulting activity data.

Photo source: Gordon Tarpley on flickr.

Elance

Elance is an online employment platform for freelancers. Covering a wide range of disciplines, with a diverse pool of freelancers, there is a lot going on and a lot to keep track of. Elance currently acts as a networking service to connect freelancers with organizations and vice versa. If Elance were to set up an online community on their site, they could create different social groups, within which freelancers and organizations, alike, could self-identify, join, and interact.

The result would be much higher satisfaction on the part of both hiring organizations and freelancers, as they would be able to interact and gain insights into finding the best fit for them. The benefit of valuable insight would not end with the participating groups, either.

With these social groups, Elance would also gain critical insights into hiring trends. Since Elance owns this valuable engagement data, important trends could be identified. For instance, Elance could determine which groups were seeing the most activity. They could also determine the types of freelance roles seeing the least activity and come up with a plan of attack for addressing that gap.

Both Elance and GoPro are established brands in their respective industry, but what if they weren’t? Can an online community help an organization whose brand isn’t quite so recognizable? The answer is a resounding yes!

Santa Cruz Music Festival

Have you ever heard of the Santa Cruz Music Festival, otherwise known as “SCMF”? If you don’t reside in the Bay Area, the answer is likely "No." Because it’s a regional event with a (presumably) modest budget, the festival needs to develop the SCMF brand as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

There are certainly traditional promotional routes that festival organizers pursue, but they often take years to show benefits. This can be a major issue for organizers who need for their next year’s festival to show growth. What measures could the organizers of the Santa Cruz Music Festival take to get fast traction, with little cost? The answer is clear to me: give SCMF fans a place to interact and help promote the festival organically!

If SCMF had its own online community on its website, they’d begin to develop festival (and brand) advocates.These are people or organizations who love your brand and are willing to promote your organization. Consumers become brand advocates through fantastic experiences.

By all accounts, SCMF 2013 was an amazingly rewarding experience for those who attended. Some attendees will become brand advocates and will spread the good word and positivity to all who will listen (no pun intended). By establishing an online community, you give brand advocates a wider audience to which they can preach. Since these interactions occur in an SCMF-branded community and are indexed by search engines, they will show up in search results more and more.

The Bay Area music lover who (tragically) has never heard of SCMF will now catch wind of how great a festival it is through Google searches for the latest and greatest music festivals. As their SEO improves, SCMF will show up higher and higher, thus making their brand more and more recognizable. In no time, the SCMF brand will develop and spread thanks to brand advocates and the associated online community. Then they are well on their way to a killer 2014 festival and beyond.

Related post: Colleague Bruce Chapman writes about 10 Ways DNN Can Improve Your Website SEO.

Conclusion

There it is, three organizations that could greatly benefit in different ways by adding an online community to their website. These use cases are applicable to a wide range of organizations in greatly varying industries. Content generation, site engagement, customer satisfaction, and brand development are ways in which most organizations can benefit from online community building.

By implementing an online community, organizations will realize that their customers and end users can help them drive awareness, visibility and new business. Use the Comments area below to share your thoughts. Would these three online community ideas work?

Online Communities: Let's Go

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