Online Community: Is Your Brand Ready?
Online community can be an important tool in differentiating and de-commoditizing brands. The notion of “community” is the through-line between many of the most successful online brand experiences, a driver of the current Web commerce resurgence, a basic tenet of the “Web 2.0″ concept, and is giving many brands a new way to create one-on-one dialogues with their customers. In any discussion of the role of online community, it is important to distinguish—first and foremost—between brands that live and breathe exclusively online and brands that use the online medium to extend a traditional brand experience.
In recent years, many brands that live exclusively online, including eBay, MySpace, Amazon, and YouTube, have achieved phenomenal success through their use of social networking and social media. However, these brands live in a different neighborhood than brands who do not exclusively live online, and have different criteria for success in the online community arena. We therefore need to evaluate online and primarily offline brands separately in order to determine how—and when—building online communities are beneficial to your brand.
ONLINE COMMUNITY CAN BE AN IMPORTANT TOOL IN DIFFERENTIATING AND DE-COMMODITIZING BRANDS.
Online Brands
Effective and successful online brands incorporate community in clearly defined and focused ways:
- MySpace—community and self-promotion
- Flickr—community and photos
- YouTube—community and video
- eBay—community and auctions
- Amazon—community and commerce
Not only do these brands combine their use of online community with a clear, focused value proposition, but they also keep a tight reign on the community features that they support. For example, Amazon keeps their features limited primarily to ratings and reviews, with the recent addition of some Wiki features. MySpace incorporates many more community features, including blogs and photo sharing, which clearly support the brand’s values of self-expression and self-promotion.
A cautionary tale in the online community space is Friendster: after gaining momentum based on the novelty of its features and functions, Friendster drove forward with a random mix of community features that lacked a clear focal point beyond social networking. It was quickly surpassed by MySpace, who better addressed and incorporated the self-promotional needs of a specific audience—the music and art community. The overarching takeaway from these successful—and unsuccessful— online brands that use community is that you must have a clear focus beyond the online community and use this focus to serve business needs.
Extending Offline Brands
Offline brands extending into the online space have had some initial success incorporating online community to accomplish a variety of business objectives, including:
- Humanizing corporate leadership
- Stimulating dialogue and loyalty with customers, employees, and partners
- Improving search engine rankings
- Addressing timely public relations issues
- Reducing customer service costs
General Motors recently featured elements of a scathing article written about them by a syndicated Boston Globe journalist on their corporate blog, along with a response, in the hopes that it would generate a more open discussion about the energy crisis. Jonathan Schwartz, President of Sun Microsystems, has become widely-known and respected for the openness of his frequent corporate blogs. An interesting example of an online community interaction that is not generated by the brand itself is Wawa, a chain of convenience stores in the eastern United States, which is the subject of the “I Love Wawa” group MySpace. This user-generated community of over 5,000 members has an authentic feel and is an indication of the willingness of loyal consumers to gather around online communities focused on largely offline brands.
Yet, despite some success, cautionary tales also abound, such as Mazda’s attempts to exploit community through blogs featuring fake viral video spots, Wal-Mart’s hiring of bloggers to support corporate PR efforts, and Dell’s negligence in not using their corporate blog to educate and inform consumers during its recent battery recall. The key lesson from brands extending into the online space is that authenticity and openness are crucial to users embracing online community.
Implications for Your Brand
The importance and role of online community to your brand is the key strategic question that must be answered before deciding which features and functions should be employed, where they should be used, when they should be introduced, and how they should be supported. Unless the addition of community functions will signifi cantly benefit your brand, they can actually detract from the user experience by drawing attention away from the more powerful functions of the online experience. Some of the strategic questions that are core to incorporating community into the online life of your brand are the following:
- Will your brand and business benefit from building an online community?
- Can online community help you deepen or extend a dialogue with the audiences that you serve?
- How will you define your community “voice”? What guidelines will you put into place for employees who participate in building and growing your community?
- Are you committed to the resources required to build and maintain online community?
- What should be the focus of your community efforts, and how can the interaction with users be authentic?
Incorporating online community has different implications for online brands versus brands extending into the online space. If carefully considered, community can provide a more emotional, engaging, and credible experience for your users, but building online community is not important or possible for every brand. If community, in general, is important to the success of your brand, then the purpose of your online community effort must be focused. The interaction should be authentic, and the strategy should serve as a filter for informing which features and functions must be clear and well developed.