Return on Community

Online community - the chance to build customer loyalty and get insights into building your business. Sounds great, right? What business wouldn't want to take advantage of that opportunity? So you spend the resources, build the community and wait for the benefits to come rolling in. But as too many companies have discovered, it's not that easy. Online communities can be an amazing way to get closer to customers. Or improperly tended, they can wither and die, taking your investment with them. The best way to extract return from an online community is to design it with your company's needs in mind. This week we asked Alan Warms, CEO of Participate.com, for his insights on getting the most from an online community. His company manages online communities for heavy hitters like AT&T and Cisco. What he knows can help you

First, Look at Your Objectives

"Don't just build the community and wait to see what emerges," urges Warms. "Design the community around what your company needs." "What is your corporate strategy and what are the objectives of the online community? Are you putting an online community in place to drive retention? To drive viral marketing? To drive customer insight?" asks Warms. Once you've decided that you can build a community that meets the needs of your company, plan a strategy that will take you where you want to go. If you want to increase customer loyalty, maybe you want to find a way to recognize customers with special e-mails or a prominent place in the community. If you're looking to kick-start viral marketing, you'll want to have an interface that makes information easy to share.

Next, Focus on Integration

Now you've defined your needs and found a suitable design for your community. The next step is finding the right technology to build it, right? Not quite yet, says Warms. "There are probably ten to fifteen platform technologies that people can buy or rent that will enable message board-type technology, asynchronous communication," he says. "The real key in choosing the right technology is knowing the kind of data you can collect from the technology, and knowing how that data integrates with the rest of your business systems." "Understand why you're putting that community in place, and where the value you're going to derive from it is," urges Warms. "If I'm putting a community of my sales force in place, then the online community technology better integrate with my sales force automation system." Whatever piece of the business puzzle you're attacking with your community, make sure community systems integrate tightly with others within your company.

Finally, Understand Who's Talking

Don't be so enraptured listening to your customers that you forget to consider the source. "Understand the purchasing and economic value of these same people who are talking. If there seems to be a very intense conversation around one particular topic, you want to make sure that the participants are the people who are actually driving your business," Warms said. "We need to show positive returns for the investments we make. It's important for companies to exert some discipline and ask why they are making this investment. They shouldn't be doing it because it's cool, but because it's fundamentally a way to differentiate their businesses." The good news is that all the work that goes into an online community is worth it. "An online community is the only asset you can build that cannot be replicated," Warms says. "If I can lock in my most valuable set of customers and get them connecting to other valuable customers on an ongoing basis, that can't be replicated somewhere else." An online community isn't a simple thing to build. But when it works, it's the most unique - and the most irreplaceable - asset a company can have.