Turning Online Communities into Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Dec 03, 2008
What's the hardest part about using online communities for feedback? It's not the technology. Thanks to community software, a community site can be up and branded within hours. It's not marketing the community to customers, employees or prospects. The marketing department can approach that with gusto. It could be getting members to participate; that can be hard, and spinning up the virtuous circle can take time. But I think the hardest part about using online communities is preparing your organization to receive and act on the feedback.
Who is going to spearhead evaluating ideas for cost and impact on the business? Not the community manager. Who is going to take the community's priorities and identify the organization's priorities? Who is going to implement each idea, champion it throughout the organization and see it through until it is complete? Definitely not the community manager!
Remember, community members participate because they want your organization to serve them better. You owe it to them to follow through.
Short term, you need to develop an infrastructure that will enable you to rapidly implement new ideas. This should be a cross-functional team charged with evaluating the big ideas-the major initiatives-for ROI, prioritizing them, championing them to the executive team, then transitioning each idea to the appropriate department for implementation.
Long term, you want to diffuse the smaller, easier to implement ideas throughout the organization: you want to foster an organizational culture centered on customer-driven innovation and co-creation. Engage employees in the community, so that they can be customer ambassadors. Dell's Communities and Conversations team is a great example of this. Employees who would not normally interact with customers-people from shipping, from logistics, from the purchasing department, from finance, from HR-now have a place to engage with customers. They carry back that customer-centered viewpoint to their departmental colleagues. The organization as a whole gets closer to the customer than even before, inspiring staff to adapt.
Remember, a research community is only as good as the changes it inspires. The sustainable competitive advantage of your online community will come from the changes you make as a result of it.