The Top Ten Reasons for Building an Online Community in 2009

(courtesy of Vocici blog)

1. You know 2009 will not be like 2008.  Will the recession end next year or will it become the longest recession in 60 years?  How will the economic and political changes affect your customers, your prospects, your partners and your employees?  You need an online community to get frequent insight into the changing attitudes and requirements of these key constituencies.
2. Give customers a place to discuss your organization.  With almost 150 million U.S. adults participating in online communities, they are already talking about you on the Internet, in social networks, forums and mailing lists.  Give them a place where they can talk about you, with you.
3. Increase loyalty just by having a community.  Just like conducting a customer satisfaction study can improve satisfaction, simply having a community can improve satisfaction.  The Deloitte and  Beeline Labs study, 2008 Tribalization of Business Survey, researched 140 organizations with communities.  Of these, 24% had already seen increased loyalty, and this was for young communities, as the majority were under two years old.
4. Introduce prospects to your organization. A virtuous circle of community engagement helps expand an open community and even win you business.  The more community participation, the more pages to be indexed by search engines: the more pages, the higher the search engine traffic: the higher the traffic, the more prospective customers discover your organization and engage with existing customers to learn about it.  (And she told two friends, and they told two friends…)
5. Generate thousands of ideas. Within eight months, My Starbucks Idea generated – and prioritized! – 55,000 ideas.  In its first 18 months, Dell IdeaStorm generated over 10,000 ideas.  As organizations and individuals adapt to the challenges of 2009, look to your online community for fresh ideas to help you improve your business.
6. Help your staff internalize and distribute feedback.  Dell has 40 employees participate in a team called Communities & Conversations.  CEOs always talk about making their organizations “customer centric”: by talking to customers and evangelizing their viewpoints across the company, as these Dell team members do, the organization truly becomes centered on the customer.
7. Provide a rich source of qualitative insights.  Brad Bortner of Forrester said it best in his independent white paper, Will Web 2.0 Transform Market Research?: “Market research online communities (MROCs) will shock the qualitative market research world. They provide cheaper, faster, and newer types of insights that today’s traditional qualitative research modes, such as focus groups, don’t currently provide.”
8. Provide comprehensive quantitative feedback. Integrate online communities with panel management or enterprise feedback management, and you can conduct projectable, representative surveys that help you size the problems and opportunities uncovered by your qualitative research.
9. Compress the traditional feedback cycle. In 2009, you don’t have the time or the resources to use the traditional feedback cycle.  You need to streamline your market research with online communities, so that you can continuously act on the voice of the customer.
10. Sustainable competitive advantage comes from the changes you make. Community members will participate in your new online community because they want your organization to serve them better.  You will engage employees in the community so that they can be customer ambassadors.  Short term, you’ll develop an infrastructure that will enable you to rapidly implement new ideas.  Long term, you’ll develop a culture centered on customer-driven innovation and co-creation.

Fantastic list of reasons. So, if you can’t call your website an online community yet or you aren’t even thinking of evolving it into an online community, maybe these reasons helped.

However, an offset of these circumstances is that 2009 has a couple of things we can look forward to – specifically within the digital environment in South Africa…

1. Results. It’s crunch-time and there will be little tolerance for hyped-up buzz-words and flaky delivery. Rather decisions and delivery will focus on things such as ROI, profitability, value, accountability and measurability…i.e. results.
2. Innovation. When forced out of one’s comfort zone, innovation and creativity comes to the for. Companies will re-evaluate their communications internally as well as to their customers - so, expect to see an exciting application of digital channels combined with well thought-out, creative messaging.
3. Relationships. 2009 will see companies, individuals and brands cherish relationships, current and new, more than ever. We can thus look forward to more time being spent on nurturing and growing relationships. The use of appropriate digital strategies and technologies to improve on CRM systems and procedures will thus be prominent this year.
4. More of WWC. World Wide Creative has kicked off this year with some really awesome projects of which we will start unveiling the curtain from March onwards and start shouting from the hilltops!! We have also made a concerted effort to increase our exposure exponentially in 2009 - so, expect to see and hear a lot more of the Heavy Chefs during the next couple of months!

As a side note, you can also view these presentations I found from the guys at TrendsSpotting on ‘Influencers Predictions’ for Online Marketing and Social Media in 2009 – A well summarized piece of work on what key figures on the web are expecting for the new year.

Here’s to a spectacular 2009 to all!

At a time like this, we can take heart from Chuck Norris. “I thought Credit Crunch was a new breakfast cereal,” said Chuck recently. 

Marketing budgets are suddenly less free-flowing and the boardroom tapdance (you know – where marketing execs present their fiery rhetoric to clients) will now have to be supported by real motives and real data.

One ray of hope has begun to emerge through this (marketing professionals take note!): the digital marketing industry is booming.

Since the sub-prime debacle kickstarted the financial freefall, online advertising has been increasing as fast as traditional advertising has been falling. In the UK, Internet campaigns run by advertisers rung up £1,682.5 million in the first half of 2008, a 21% year-over-year increase. At the same time, old school advertising spend has dropped by 4.6%. Across the globe, we’re seeing similar trends, with online adspend quickly overtaking other channels within marketing.

So, what is behind this shift? Here are four factors that are driving digital success:

• An online presence is an accountable and cost-effective destination for creative strategy.
• Smart ideas are a highly persuasive, and fast moving, currency online.
• The value exchange between agency and clients is measurable. Yes, you heard right: ‘measurable’.
• Compelling revenue models for marketing agencies (you just have to think a little differently).

I was chatting to my old mate, Pete Smith, recently. He works for a top online media broker in the UK: “Fred, nowadays, marketing agencies have moved wayyy past just advertising and creative communication. A marketing person will fall very short in a high-level meeting unless they understand digital strategy with all the terminology that goes with it.”

That means, as a marketing professional, you should know the difference between SEO and SEM; how to conduct an effective ORM strategy; understand ‘persuasive momentum‘ and ‘calls to action‘… and, above all, get in touch with your inner gravatar.

The great thing is: it’s not that hard. Old school principles still apply. Ideas still rock. Creativity still rolls. Online is just another channel – with a whole new set of rules, sure – but the audience are still just ordinary people, just like you and me.

So, what are you waiting for? Quit chewing your nails and get your shift together.

This post originally appeared as an article on BizCommunity, here.