marketing to developing online communities

April 7th, 2010 • posts i've written

I’m sharing this thought in-process: how do we identify community needs and satisfy those needs as brands/organizations?

Two attributes of communities seem absolutely essential to addressing their needs (the names aren’t quite right yet):

1. Findability on-line: how easy is it to search for and target members of a community and the digital centers of gravity for that community’s activities
2. Maturity of community identity & cohesion: how strong is the group’s identity (meaning how useful is it in defining individual identity), how tightly connected are the members of this community – is it a community or a dispersed crowd

In the diagram, I’ve plotted the rough trajectory of three types of communities. These are over-simplifications, to be sure, but I’m trying to demonstrate the maturation of different types of communities and how that maturation differentiates their needs:

1. Media Property Fan Communities: as an example, consider fans of Lost. These fans belonged to other communities before the show began, but were not declared Lost fans until the program aired. Moreover, as we use our fandom to define our identity online, in many digital networks it’s easy to spot fans of the program (b/c they joined a group or clicked ‘Like’) but in the early stages of the fan community, it was difficult to communicate with all Lost fans unless you were the producers themselves – the community needed time to develop connections.
2. Traditional Movements: or, put another way, grassroots movements pre-digital or without digital tools in early development. Perhaps early members of the movement have very few digital behaviors or participate in relatively few digital platforms. But as participation and awareness grows, the community may ultimately consist of members with more digital behaviors.
3. Modern Movements: Perhaps I’m over simplifying by plotting this progression at a 45-degree angle and of course very few communities would progress exactly so – but the Obama campaign, as an example, would seem to have developed in very  much this way. Please debate in the comments.

In addition to plotting the progression of communities along these two dimensions, I’ve begun considering marketing activities that take advantage of inflection points along the development of a community:

• Provide digital tools to grow and coordinate group: Groups that are forming without digital tools/behaviors and offline from digital platforms are typically regionally focused movements – to leapfrog borders and demographics, outside organizations/brands can use their digital pulpits to increase awareness of the nascent community (in the way niche music/art communities are used/propelled by brands) or by actually building/licensing tools to facilitate digital communications between members.
• Provide opportunities for cooperation and collaboration: At this point, community members need to be connected in more meaningful ways – and these connections can be made and strengthened through collaboration and cooperation. But to be honest, this type of activity, at this point in the community, has a higher success rate if begun by the media property or the fans themselves.
• Market spreadable products and content: Only when community members are both findable and tightly connected should an outside brand or organization begin to develop and deploy products and content for that community (you should also ask yourself if you’re targeting an actual community or a disconnected cluster of communities).

Related posts:

1. fans are the future of digital marketing
2. quotes on marketing, culture, and digital
3. gini coefficient for online participation

Tags: Fandom, marketing, online communities

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