Building Your Online Business Community
Online Business Communities have rapidly become a competitive marketplace. Companies are investing millions into their own communities, and with mixed results.
According to a recent article on SocialMediaToday.com, author Jerry Bowles writes “…several giant corporations have launched online business communities aimed at engaging small business owners and managers through a conversational social media approach” and lists more than half a dozen companies having invested $1M to $5M each into their Online Business Communities. Membership counts in these online communities range from single digits to tens of thousands. Time obviously a major factor for low member counts, but not the only reason.
Sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo which are universally geared towards Online Professionals and fall in to the Social Networking category generate a lot of buzz traffic and offer a useful way to keep connected with close and distant contacts have an advantage in that they are not tied to a tight niche market or industry. Online Business Communities for big corporate well-known and established companies such as those listed in Bowles’ article, e.g. American Express, Visa, Dell, Intuit/QuickBooks, have the luxury of pre-exisitng large member groups with common and also recurring needs and interests specific to those organizations and their products also have an edge with their Online Business Communities because of those factors.
But one category of Online Business Communities to question are those in the niche market segments or industries that are starting up. We touched on the subject a couple weeks ago with DrivingSales.com, but there are others. The challenge with such Online Business Communities is their unique value proposition. Without an actual product or service, what are these online communities accomplishing? What can they do to develop and keep an audience aside from developing an audience for the sake of it?
Bowles makes some excellent observations that are good take-aways from his article which such all communities must consider.
3. The quality of the content of a web community trumps the most well-financed demand generation program. No amount of promotion can keep people coming to a community that is not engaging and useful.
6. Participants in smaller business communties are more engaged and likely to participate than those in bigger communities so make your community only as big as it needs to be. Two thousand engaged and qualified potential customers is better than a million page views.
8. That leads to what I modestly call Jerry’s corollary: the online communities that are most likely to succeed are those that are focused narrowly on engaging buyers of specialized, high-end products.
A concern with Online Business Communities that sprout from venture capital and which are designed for niche market segments and industries rather than evolving naturally from its customer audience is that through mere idealism they are putting the cart before the horse so to say in that they expect a software communications system to perpetuate the need for a business model.
MySpace evolved out of the need for bands to promote themselves which led to widespread popularity in promotion of individual persons. Facebook evolved that commodity into a more marketer-friendly environment. Both of these catered to a specific generation (or two). LinkedIn honed that down to a universal class of people, i.e. Online Business Professionals. But these sites are ultimately appeal to millions which is what gives them a chance to be successful.
Banking your model on something that will only appeal to a few thousand people makes for tremendous challenge. It limits advertising capabilities and puts you at the disadvantage with conversions and numbers.
DrivingSales.com - Dealer Auto Sales Website Strategy
One of the hotter Dealer Auto Sales Strategy Websites these days is DrivingSales.com. The site is officially in beta mode but it is essentially functional at this point. I have been registered with it now for a few months and recognize numerous names that are signed up. In fact one of my closer contacts is becoming heavily involved with the proprietors.
Anyhow, I have mixed feelings about the Dealer Auto Sales Website. It is designed to be a space where dealers and vendors can network and collaborate. More importantly, Dealers and Vendors can submit an Auto Sales Strategy and receive feedback on it. Dealers can also rate Vendor Auto Sales Website Providers. This is all good in theory, but its a “toot your own horn (or someone else’s)” approach to networking which appears all too common in the Auto Sales Industry.
LinkedIn was one of the first on the scene with this sort of networking system. I have been a free subscriber there for years and have yet established a desire to upgrade to a paid account and LinkedIn is a damn good Networking Space. In order for a Dealer Auto Sales Strategy Website to profit I suspect it will rely on ad revenue. But without appeal to a mass consumer audience this is a tall order.
So, while my curiosity is stemmed, I am skeptical about the Dealer Auto Sales Website. Seems idealistic to me and obviously backed by Venture Capital which I personally find dangerous unless the enterprise entails assembling widgets or is a Finance Business. But for a limited niche networking site how will it pay for itself?
Spreading Marketing Seeds Around the Web
So you have a blog or a website that promotes your online brand marketing message. You maintain the blog and make daily updates as well as ensuring it has relevant and fresh content each time. But if that’s the only thing you’re doing, you’re missing out on a whole World Wide Web of opportunities. Consider the following tools to increase your web presence and get your brand noticed more widely.
Twitter
This free social network service allows members to send updates to their account through text-based applications. Updates are generally 140 characters long, giving the website the reputation of being a micro-blogging service. The updates are posted on the user’s front page and other users can see them or sign up for a feed to be alerted when a user updates their site.
LinkedIn
As a business-oriented social networking site, many professionals frequent LinkedIn to maintain a list of contacts and details for people in their business. Last December, the website reported more than three million visitors each month, making it a great way to get your brand marketing noticed.
Squidoo
This is a blogging website that allows anybody with Internet access to set up page that deals with anything they want. Content creators share in advertising revenue, but it’s generally a site that garners high traffic. By posting a large amount of content about your brand, business, products, services or anything else relevant to your company, you can spread the word to potentially millions of readers.
There are so many websites and methods for getting your brand noticed by the online community. We’ve discussed three of them here, but there are probably dozens more. We’ll discuss more websites in the future to help you even more.
The parallels of Web 2.0 and real life
Do you ever consider what makes Web 2.0-minded systems like MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn so popular?
The obvious answer is because the users control their own experience and influence that of others. When you join these online communities you are able to present a compartmentalized version of who you are and network with everyone else in the system.
Kind of like real life, wouldn’t you say?
This is just how the real world works. We are all in a system (society) with rules and guidelines, or protocols to which we adhere to create a persona of our selves that we share with others and network. Naturally, any system that can mimic this sort of creativity and liberty in our online experience is going to win over some users.
When you look around you, one thing you see everywhere is advertising and it is usually loud, big, and bold. Take a drive down the highway to a metropolitan area and tell me what you see. Billboards, billboards, billboards. You see ads on bus stops and on buildings. You hear ads on radio, TV, and let’s not forget magazines. The point is, ads are everywhere and they are typically geared towards a particular audience that is likely to be viewing them.
The same goes for online advertising, but with the Internet, advertising can be taken a step further. There is a level of precision and reporting that go along with online advertising. So why, according to The Wall Street Journal, was only 5% of money spent on advertising done online?
I think it might have something to do with price. A quick analysis of advertising with The Wall Street Journal shows that a full page color ad for the US circulation would cost about $254,000. With 1.7M readers the advertiser is paying $0.15 an “impression”. Step down to a 1/7 page ad the advertiser cost would be about $28,400, or $0.016 per impression. A typical banner ad on the Web costs advertisers now about $20 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). This equates to about $0.02 per impression.
This is a very rough calculation but you get the point. The cost for advertising on the Web can be and typically is significantly less expensive which I think is the reason why 95% more money is spent in off-line advertising. This will change in time, and probably not too far off. There are companies out there getting a jump on this and with behavioral advertising hitting the scene, the cost for online advertising will rise steadily and quickly, possibly some day surpassing print and television advertising.
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