Building a Community to Support a Brand

Shane Atchison talks about the value of online communities, a concept that is growing in the new web. Building on the success of such communities as MySpace and the more niche ones like Winelog, the online community for wine drinkers, companies are trying to build communities that support their brand and create the conversations that increase sales. All of these sites fit Information Week’s web 2.0 definition, “Web 2.0 includes all the Web sites out there that get their value from the actions of users.”

Shane offers these tips, release control, entertain, connect, be authentic, and innovate. The first one is key and it hard for many traditional marketing efforts, as is the call to be authentic. Attempts to manipulate the blogosphere and other parts of the participatory web have all be outed and backfired. Transparency makes manipulation much more difficult.

He also offers some ROI measures such as “number of sign-ups for community updates (e.g., newsletter opt-in), number of "send to a friend" messages, time spent with community content (e.g., films, music), member conversion rate (percentage of completing goals).” There are more.

One of the examples he gives is Helio, a phone company that is using community to build a brand. In went to their site and found that Helio is attempting to sell membership into a community rather than simply a phone. On their site they say, “Don’t call us a phone company.” They have integrated with MySpace and claim to be the only service with MySpace built right in. As they say, “Only MySpace on Helio lets you post photo bulletins directly from your Helio device, compose MySpace Mail, view your friends’ pages, post comments and add new friends when you’re out on the town.”

Helio has a Helio blog of course. It has posts designed to appeal to a hip young audience writing on music and books. The content is likely outsourced. web 2.0 marketing