When the Business of a Community is Business
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Aug 27, 2008
Angelika V. asks, "How can you leverage online communities if your customers are businesses? Do businesses regularly frequent (see value in) online communities and if so, what are the success criteria to making a successful online community for businesses?"
Of course, businesses don't frequent online communities, business people do. Similar to my last post, on creating communities for commodities, where the community will only be successful if it is about use of your product not the product itself, a business community will only be successful if it meets needs and concerns of your customers that extend beyond the product itself. Why business people will frequent a community varies widely, and ranges from looking for business, seeking out new business partners, strengthening existing partnerships to general networking.
Looking for business/Seeking new business partners - The earliest online business community I personally participated in was PRSIG, CompuServe's PR & Marketing Forum, which I joined in the early 1990s. I think many of the participants there were self-employed freelancers looking for business; this was certainly a good professional use of time for some, and in fact I hired several people from that forum for PR and general writing projects. (I even made some online friends that are still friends in the real world, 15 years later.)
Strengthening business partnerships - Two common types of business communities strengthen relationships: the Advisory Council, where customers give their supplier feedback on product development and service offerings, and the Support Portal, where customers get detailed technical support or customer service from the vendor and one another. The Intel Open Port community, celebrating its first birthday today, is a support portal, enabling IT professionals to get better technical content from Intel than they could before. From seeking best practices and information about Intel vPro processor technology to looking for tips managing their server environments to seeking ideas for better IT management in general, Open Port caters to the real-world, day-in-the-life work concerns of a very technical crowd. As a byproduct, Open Port also provides a great opportunity for networking (the people kind, not the computer kind).
Networking - More recent communities that I've participated in for business have been primarily to network, providing a chance to interact with like-minded professionals. For users of a product or suite of products from a vendor, such networking provides an opportunity to share practical problems and solutions, to learn from others facing similar business challenges.
You know you have created a successful business community if your customers don't feel guilty spending time there during work hours!