Let`s talk about this community thing. Just lately the topic has surfaced frequently, and I have been thinking about community and its role in our lives. For example, the community as represented in our social lives, the village or suburb we live in, the parents involved in a particular school, the interested parties in a diving club or off-road adventure club, the people working together in a business.
Community is about like-minded individuals who value and interact with the group they are part of.
As we spend more of our lives in cyberspace, community will become increasingly important in the electronic world and on the Internet.
In many ways, community is important in almost any aspect of our lives. It is also understandable that as we spend more of our lives in cyberspace, community will become increasingly important in the electronic world and on the Internet as well as in the way we think about markets and market development.
For example, in looking more closely at the structure and development behind the major portals on the Internet, it has everything to do with defining and creating the wave around new communities.
Take the example of Music Boulevard, which is creating a community around music and further specialising the interest of these like-minded groups around different types of music. Amazon.com is also creating a community around books.
A community is, after all, a gathering together of groups of people interested in a particular topic or with a vested interest in a particular topic, and allowing them to interact with you and each other. This clearly allows you (the marketer) to tap into the subtleties of lifestyle and amplify that effect in terms of creating demand and satisfying that need.
The force of networks of like-minded people is amplified in cyberspace, since it is ruled by network economics. Communities create their own value as they grow, and low entry and exit costs change many of the rules of competition and industry models. The real power of the channel in cyberspace is that it allows high-bandwidth information to be exchanged between the organisation and its customers. But more importantly, it enables powerful communication between the customers themselves (creating the community effect).
A key focus for marketing and selling on the Web is targeting communities and then leveraging that dynamic. There is also significant power implied when creating and targeting these communities. This is good for both the business and the community, provided of course that it is properly done and not abused.
The notion of community is based on value and the power of cyberspace will quickly tune out your community, should you break the unwritten rules of what is acceptable and what is not. The power of the community dynamic clearly centres on our desire to belong and our willingness to participate in things that are of interest and important to us.
Online services and others on the Web have already learned that in building digital community centres, the closer you can get to the activities about which the community feels passionate, the greater the potential value that can be captured. They have also discovered that communities don`t like to be passive, that it is vital to create the ability for the community itself to interact.
A great example of a community of value on the Web is the subscription-based SportsZone service. This is the sport lover`s heaven, a virtual sports stadium attracting millions of visitors a day. It provides up-to-the-minute sports information, play-by-plays of games in progress and discussion forums. It also provides the ability to draft teams and set up fantasy leagues to play against each other. Notice all the elements of community: a topic about which the subscribers are passionate and the opportunity to interact not just with you (their service or product provider) but with each other.
Although I use examples out of the popular domain of the consumer market, communities are also relevant in a business-to-business scenario.
So there we are: the more things change, the more they stay the same. In thinking about the topic of community in cyberspace, the basic force remains the same as in any physical world example. It is about people who want to interact with others about topics which interest them. Really simple, isn`t it?
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