Best practices for online customer communities

Dion Hinchcliffe has taken traditional online community best practices as a foundation, and created a list of a dozen best practices for customer online communities. Will online communities help your business?

Numerous studies over the years have underscored the benefits of customer communities, ranging from the 2001 McKinsey-Jupiter Media Metrix showing that “customers of web community features generate two-thirds of sales despite accounting for only one-third of a site’s visitors” to the brand new Deloitte study recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal that showed that over a quarter of community initiatives increased sales even while most business-sponsored customer communities struggled to achieve critical mass in terms of users.

Hinchcliffe goes on to say that “it’s clear from a number of sources that business are beginning to get community religion en masse,” pointing to Deloitte’s Tribalization of Business customer community study.

(Thanks to Charles Knickerbocker for sending a link to Hinchcliffe’s clueful article.)