Online Communities: Where left brain meets right brain

One of the most fascinating aspects of social media and branded online communities in particular – is the intersection (collision?!) between the spontaneous expression of people (consumers, customers, members etc) online and the driving need for corporations (brands, companies, associations etc) to distill structured meaning & insight that they can act on. Yes, the real world played at fast pace…

Several innovative brands (eg. Dell, Proctor & Gamble, Starbucks, Arts & Entertainment) have understood the power of this opportunity – and have learnt, invariably through trial and error, how best to harness it. Not surprisingly, there are traps for beginners!

The first and perhaps most obvious challenge is, of course, to get people to the community site and to keep them coming back! This challenge lies not only with the strategic thinking behind your site but with the nature of your creative (content!). The overwhelming advice from the experienced hands here is to remind yourself that it is “the community’s” site and that “what’s in it for them” should be front of mind! The research also points to developing embeddedness as being critical to this challenge.

The nature of this challenge - content – is also one for some creative right brain thinking (and reacting!).

However, there is equally a trap in establishing a highly engaging site, with embedded members – that leaves the marketer wondering why they have established the community forum in the first place… 

The recently appointed Digital Agency gets to trial every gimmick (game, competition, animation etc) at its disposal but the marketer is left wondering “So what happens now?!”

The challenge here is to make sure you have the right technology platform - a “back-office” to accomodate the structured analytical data you need to make sense of the community. Please adjust to left brain and read on…

To be useful, insight should not be anonymous. You need to identify individuals and types of individuals (you remember, segments!). You can then understand which ideas are preferred by which individuals or which segments and vice versa. Not only that, you can respond individually and appropriately to those who care about a specific idea and its related follow-up action.

And what about the definition of an idea in the first place – do you really want to analyse the same idea expressed in 50 different ways? Your back-office needs to have the ability to group ideas into themes and to filter for those that are worth analysing – without losing the power of the customer’s words in the process.

And what’s the point of using social media if we cannot accommodate the selection and ranking of ideas – this is the very structure that we as marketers have been after. Afterall, one of the major benefits of these communities are the “ideas we hadn’t thought of”.

So, the back-office needs to accomodate “user-generated” ideas that can be progressively presented back to the community for voting and ranking; in such a way that each idea (or theme!) is given sufficient “time at bat” (for baseballers) or “time at the the crease” (for cricketers) to be statistically significant. If you say this quickly enough, it becomes easier. The real point being that it is a piece of complexity that should be covered by your technology platform! 

The bottom line is that online communities need a healthy dose of both left and right brain thinking to be successful! A wierd and wonderful combination of qualitative and quantitative data and more importantly, a forum that can generate genuine customer advocates.