This is old content! The Womnibus Blog has been retired. For the new stuff, visit 
WOMMA/Summit (Day 2) -- Communities: Creating Them and Working in Them
In this last session of the day (one of the last three, I should say) Leslie Forde from Communispace, Bill Hanekamp from The Well Advertising, and Mike Walsh from Leverage Software spoke about how to create vibrant and thriving consumer communities, as well as how to use them.
Mike began by explaining that he was interested in speaking about company-created consumer communities -- as opposed to how companies can leverage the preexisting online communities that abound. According to Mike, the benefits for a company when building a consumer community are:
* Listen better, innovate faster
* WOM marketing and buzz -- drive referrals and visibility
* Know your evangelists and partner with them
* Cut marketing content and customer services costs
* Reduce attrition/retain customers
* Build brand loyalty
Customer communities exist for a variety of reasons, including: self expression, commerce, information sharing, relationship building, belonging, and fun. And one of the things that Leverage Software has found is that many times a customer community that is created to support one of those distinct functions ends up being "taken over" by the customers and used for other reasons, as well.
According to Mike, when creating a customer community, a company needs to:
* Determine goals
* Identify participants -- Customers, partners, prospects, staff, industry experts
* Define rules of engagement -- Anonymity, honesty, ethics, language, responsibilities
* Provide value
* Enable fun
Mike also explained that social networking communities go beyond forum discussions, allowing communications to be shared either with one or with many participants. They are more broad, better able to evolve, and make it easier for communications to saturate the environment.
Leslie began by explaining her community-facilitation experience -- in which she has managed customer communities for Communispace. The most important thing, she said, is finding the right set of people to be the co-creators for your brand. The participants in the communities that Communispace manages -- which are private and password protected, as opposed to public -- have been asked to do things such as:
* Empty their purse and take a picture, upload it so we can see what brands are there
* Take a picture of your pantry before you go grocery shopping... then after shopping.
The consumers that are active within their communities are anxious to help and advise the brand -- and are also eager ti engage with each other. They ask each other brand and product related questions, offer tips to their fellow community members, and pose questions that the brands would be wise to pay attention to.
Top 5 Community Myths (according to Leslie):
* Invite everybody and anybody
* Big numbers are needed to have impact
* Blogs = Community
* Throw money at them
* Don't tell them anything important
What is the business value of engaging customers in communities? According to Leslie, they are:
* Insightss
* More loyal customers
* Increase marketing effectiveness
* Advancing your career
* Richer customer relationship capital
Bill described a specific case study for People to People, and specifically how the social networking site that The Well Advertising built for them impacted their business. The Well Advertising worked with People to People's Student Ambassador program -- which targets high level high school students to participate in their foreign exchange program.
The students in the program travel abroad, and come back with a 98% satisfaction rate. The problem was that people simply didn't know about it. The organization had no online presence, and was nearly totally anonymous. Because students had to be nominated -- by teachers and community leaders, etc. -- the program's invisibility began to affect their recruitment rates.
People to People approached The Well Advertising to help them create a more powerful online presence -- a way for the company to increase its reach without breaking the bank. The Well, Bill explained, came up with a microsite strategy where students could come together online to post and blog about their experiences with the Student Ambassador program.
So, why a social networking site?
* Peer to peer advocacy is the most effective
* Aligned with online trends including niche sites (students don't have to quit MySpace to start participating on the People to People microsite)
* People to People was the perfect candidate to benefit from a microsite
According to Bill, crafting a site that the students would actually use included:
* Establishing best practices -- the site, according to students, "couldn't suck" and had to have slickness similar to more widely used commercial social network sites
* Feature richness: personal profile, picture uploads, upload songs, create groups, etc.
* Incorporating freeware and mashups to keep the costs conservative (The Well Advertising completed the project for 20% of their allotted budget)
* Outsourcing the hosting
* Promoting the hell out of it (but with a light push, just by saying that "it's available")