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Better Togethering(1) – Why the online community is not evil

How many times have you mentioned Facebook, Twitter, or Boxee (shout out to Avner and crew!) and gotten the an eye-roll? There seems to be a stigma developing in the industry because everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) is attempting to build community components into their application offerings. The bad news is it’s not going to stop anytime soon. The good news is that providers are getting better at implementing these systems and consumers are starting to experience real value.

So, why is the online community not a fad and/or evil? At its core, the online community is designed to build closer relationships between the consumers and the product/service provider. It’s important to distinguish that online community does NOT always have to build relationships between consumers and other consumers. Social networking focuses on connecting people in online communities. Online community is a higher level concept that is simply about the building of a body of active and engaged individuals.

Why do providers need to build customer relationships? In the early 1900′s it was common to buy soap directly from a human being that ran a local soap store. Customers would go to this person’s store and buy soap, share feedback, make feature requests, and hopefully deliver praise for the proprietor’s products. The proprietor would in turn make products that the customers desired. Today’s consumer packaged goods (CPG) giant Proctor & Gamble needed to reinvent this system because they could not afford to place an individual in every town they wanted to serve and they could not afford to manufacture an infinite number of variations on their product. Instead they created the first Brand and marketed their products (a small subset) using their brand promises to replace the direct connection that existed prior. As America endured it’s industrialization more and more companies chose to use brand instead the more costly direct representative approach to representing their products and today product sales reps don’t really exist except for big-ticket items like cars (oh and we all love car salesmen!).  What companies like P&G failed to see was that the cost saving brand approach was also stripping them of their consumer feedback. They, like most other businesses following their model, became disconnected from their consumers who in turn became less excited about their products. They also found that they had to use manipulative marketing messages to persuade customers to buy their products. They had to lie.

Today the world is changing, or in a small way reverting back, to the direct connection model. People are media-saavy and see right through manipulative marketing/advertising attempts to persuade their purchases. To overcome this, smart providers are using online community to reverse the system. Instead of convincing consumers to buy their products they are letting consumers tell them what products to make. Providers are finding that watching customers using their products gives them incredible insights. Listening to them talk about their products does as well. Building systems that facilitate these observations and discussions is what online community is all about.

Google is a perfect example of well implemented online communities. While no one really thinks of Google as a community platform, their free applications connect us (search, email, document sharing, maps, etc) and in turn inform them about our desires, needs, and behaviors. They use this information to make their products better and sell other products to us.  In return we love them.

Stay tuned… BT2 is coming next week. We’ll be talking about the “R” word, relevance.

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Posted by Joseph Juhnke on February 3, 2009

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