Many organizations and their customers are finding more value in branded online communities. As the web continues to become a social communication channel, this relationship-driven marketing strategy is beneficial for both the business and customer when executed properly. Communities can offer a member answers to questions, interesting content, access to like-minded people, and a direct line of communication, while providing a business with a sales & marketing channel and a group of potential brand advocates. Communities can be built to fit the needs of the organization and utilized to accomplish a number of marketing objectives. Today's continued use of social networks and community platforms gives marketers a unique opportunity to easily utilize a number of options to create a community. Organically growing that community into a valuable business asset remains the critical challenge. Communities tend to fail when they are unable to stimulate long-term interaction and participation among their own members. Communities can only grow in value when community members contribute, providing more content for users, information for marketers, and creating strong community ties along the way. Businesses must find ways to encourage interaction and strong participation if they want their community to flourish.
Many organizations choose to embrace their online community by recognizing and rewarding individual community members. Recognizing members allows companies to establish a deeper connection with the community, creating a personal experience and a sense of ownership among the community. Recognition also encourages members to contribute better content more often. A few companies have proven to be successful at using member recognition programs to encourage interaction.
Point-based systems can be used to encourage members of the communities to participate in forums, answer other member's questions, creating content, replying to a post etc. Points can be accumulated and exchanged for incentives such as waving a community membership fee, gaining exclusive access to portions of the site, or earning prizes and discounts. Microsoft's Silverlight Developer Community functions on a point based system allowing users to accumulate different numbers of points for different levels of engagement. The site even features a hall-of-fame listing top contributors and their point levels.
The Experts Exchange community depends on it's point based system to generate the site's content. Experts Exchange is a knowledge-sharing platform in which community experts are awarded points for answering other member's questions about technology problems and solutions. In this system, members actually grade the expert's work and points are awarded based on the number of points the question was worth (may be assigned a value up to 500) and the quality of the expert's work. Experts are recognized by earning free memberships and special year-end awards.
Peer recognition occurs within online communities when members of the community recognize other influential members. MyStarbucksIdea.com is a good example of peer recognition. Members of the site vote on their favorite product improvements and unique ideas in hopes that Starbuck's may actually implement the suggestion. Members who have ideas implemented are recognized not only by Starbucks but also the community as thought leaders. Others aspire to come up with that next 'best' idea and continue to participate with their own ideas.
Member spotlights are becoming more common on blogs and member communities. This sort of member recognition can often be as simple as listing top blog contributors and commenters on the community landing page or newsletter. Organizations can also host user generated content contests or challenges. For example, H+M clothing partnered with Sims 2 for a clothing design competition. More than 1,000 aspiring fashion designers and fans of The Sims submitted designs online that were voted on by more than 100,000 people and viewed by more than 500 million people in six weekly fashion shows on Yahoo.com.
