Public Communities vs. Private Communities
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jan 26, 2009
The most important decision facing any manager charged with starting a new online community is whether it should be public or private. This single decision will have the largest effect on the growth and success of the community and on the resources required from your organization.
A quick look at the contrasting pros and cons of closed (private) communities and open (public) communities:
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Public Community |
Private Community |
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Pros |
Cons |
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Any visitor to the web site can become a member, requiring less effort to invite and build membership. |
Prospective members must be selected, screened then actively marketed to until they join the community. |
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Public communities can grow to be quite large, providing for the ability to compare and contrast different member segments and allowing for segmentation on demand, with subgroups invited to participate in specific research objectives. |
Private communities are smaller communities, preventing the use of detailed cross-tabulation of key market segments. |
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Service and support issues documented and resolved in a public community become a matter of record, searchable by others with similar issues. |
Customer issues solved in a private community are not visible to nonmembers. |
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"Open online communities are the perpetual motion machines of marketing. Once a community is spun up, the centripetal force of community activity will lead to ever greater community activity, in a virtuous circle." -Virtuous Circle of Online Community |
Private communities take significantly more effort to get started, requiring the creation of more content and participation of more staff members, since-with fewer members-there are fewer potential member-to-member interactions than in a public community. |
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Public Community |
Private Community |
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Cons |
Pros |
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Members can be reluctant to share certain insights because all comments are public. |
Private communities build an intimacy that leads to fuller disclosure and richer insights. This is especially valuable for health-care related communities, where members discuss quite personal experiences with disease and chronic illness. (See Delivering Continuous Insights: Involving Consumers in Every Decision.)
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Competitors can study the community to better understand where your organization fails to meet the current needs of customers and prospects. |
Private communities provide a measure of confidentiality, allowing detailed discussions of sensitive strategic topics, such as product and service roadmaps.
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Open communities suffer from self-selection bias and are as unrepresentative of customer bases as open online polls are. (See When Survey Results are Qualitative.) |
Because the membership of a private community is controlled, the community manager can keep the membership representative of the key constituency (e.g., customers, employees) by inviting prospective members from currently underrepresented demographic groups. |
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The exclusivity of private communities makes membership in such a community more attractive, with greater perceived value, than membership in a public community.
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Both types of communities have their place, and most organizations should have a mix of public and private communities, depending on the different objectives of each community.
What pros and cons did I miss?