Sam Decker of BazaarVoice posts about “Ghost Town” Brand Communities, and his post makes good points, beginning with an acknowledgment (via Gartner) that 50% of brand communities will fail. Within the remaining 50%, degree of success isn’t clear. “These failures don’t mean that online community-building is a waste of time,” Sam writes, “or that it can’t be done.”

But it’s complex, and the appropriate strategy could be markedly different from one brand to the next. Before beginning the virtual barn-raising in a new community initiative, tread carefully and consider what success means to you.

He goes on to say that

From a marketer’s perspective, the idea of a brand community sounds great. The expectation is that it will be a petri dish which will virally grow customer engagement, and this type of engagement will lead to sales. The problem is, few customers jump into that petri dish, fewer still will stick around, and the community interaction usually has no contextual bridge to purchasing. That’s three strikes. Most brand communities serve a very, very small set of customers (in relation to their customer base or market size) with either a lot of passion or a lot of time on their hands. And let’s face it, not every brand has the potential to inspire lasting passion and sustain a Facebook-type community. Exceptions are cult brands that have passion and community built into their product ethos, such as Harley Davidson or Apple. But you can’t create that by putting up a community. That starts way upstream, with the product and the brand.

I wouldn’t call Facebook a community – it’s a crowd within which communities can emerge. I would define community (following Cliff Figallo, former director of the seminal online community, the WELL, as shared relationships that persist and gain a history of interaction. Social network systems like Facebook are more fragmented. Facebook has a group-forming facility which can work as a platform for intentional community, but many of those groups don’t get a great level of adoption and participation. I say all this to make the point that Sam and I probably don’t agree about what constitutes community, and how or whether community can scale. The most successful online communities (e.g. the WELL) have scaled through the emergence of smaller subcommunities as the number of active participants grows, and that’s a good thing if you can meet the community management challenge it presents.

He says “when the community audience is small and unfamiliar with one another, a prospective visitor’s motivation to build social capital or help others dissolves.”

If visitors are not passionate about the topic, they are less likely to jump in. And for both reasons the vibrance and participation in the community are next to go. Which causes the next visitor not to join. This is the domino effect that leads most brand communities to turn into a ghost town.

I don’t disagree here, but there’s a solution to this problem. From my comment on his post: “seed the community early with members who will commit and persist, who care about the subject(s) of the community, and who are articulate.”

I think the thrust of Sam’s post here is that the Bazaarvoice social commerce model – which “creates interactions and contributions around the product or service they’re trying to sell” – is the most effective solution – but I don’t know that it’s a community solution. This model “fosters opportunities for the creation of content that helps others make purchasing decisions, driving more sales and resulting in a quicker ROI.” He goes on to say this:

This type of strategy needn’t require a person to register or become a full-fledged member — they should be able to write a product review, ask or answer a question, or write a story without feeling like they have to make a commitment. Whether that contributor feels like they’ve joined a community by participating is not the point. Their contribution is useful for the visitors to the site, who came to learn more about the brand and get their questions answered — not to “friend” people or help others. And yet, once a critical mass of content is shared, a community of shared interest will start to form. People will write the 101st review because there’s a community around a product! This “accidental community” starts to form, which amplifies the engagement to the content and profiles.

I don’t see much chance of persistence or relationship in this context – this is more of an interactive audience than a community. This is not to diminish the proven value of the Bazaarvoice product – the growth of the company suggests they’re creating real value with their approach.

This leaves the question whether “brand community” is desirable and worth the effort required to make it happen, and I would say that depends on the brand and the goals for the community. You might want to create a community of advocates – or critics – to work as something like a focus group, and that community would not necessarily have to scale large to be effective. You might want to support a very active affinity group – an example is the platform for its community of riders created by Specialized Bikes, where you could find other Specialized writers and set up rides.

If you think community is a good fit for your business, you should pursue a well-considered strategic conversation – make sure your goals are clear and that they would be served by a community solution, and how that would work.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 9:15 am and is filed under Markets are Conversations, Online Community, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.