On-line virtual communities

One mechanism for keeping in touch with your customers and allowing your customers to keep in touch with each other to gain insights such as best practice, or to solve each other's problems is to build virtual communities on-line.

Often such communities are seen as the preserve of technical support or service groups within an organisation. However, used effectively they can be an excellent way of building dialogue with customers from a marketing point of view. FieldShare is an example created by dobney.com, or Notanant is an example of a generalised virtual communities or social networking system.

A virtual community is a group of people or customers that come together to exchange ideas and information. There are four effective ways of building virtual communities on the internet

Of these, the first three are the most straightforward to implement and are particularly effective because they allow users to review existing discussions and to look at the information in their own time.

Real-time forums can be effective (eg on-line conferences or chat-based "interviews"), but they rely on your ability to attract an audience to your event at a particular time, which typically involves a great deal of pre-promotion.

A large audience means that the conversation is going to be largely one-way from you to them, reducing the potential for dialogue or finding out who is listening. In addition, for those unable to make the event at the time, real-time content of video or audio requires time for review, whereas written material can be scanned, edited and summarised. Consequently, although real-time forums are available they are less common than the pioneers expected.

Web-based communities or social networks

Web-based communities are the most sophisticated mechanism for building an on-line community, and are often the simplest for end users. They also allow for advertising and visual presentation of material which are elements that are typically missing from email groups or newsgroups.

The underlying features of a web-based communities are

1. A database that records new users registration and allows users to update their details, potentially with space for the users to advertise and promote themselves.

2. A discussion forum where users post comments, queries and questions. Ideally this should happen in real-time (so there is no delay because the post has to pass through a moderator or webmaster before being added to the discussion).

3. Papers, links and resources that are of interest to the general community and that can be added to by users in addition to the company and potentially e-commerce facilities to complete purchases on-line.

4. Links to other members and the ability for members to inter-react separately from the database management.

From a marketing point of view this gives you an opportunity to monitor discussions, or even pose questions to the group, to use the database of users as a basis for emailing a newsletter and to add advertising and promotional material to the site. You can also monitor who is visiting the site and what they are looking at if you wish.

An example of a web-based community built by dobney.com is FieldShare - an on-line database for market research fieldworkers that includes a forum and a mechanism for fieldworkers to find work. Alternatively look at Notanant which offers a generic framework for organising complex on-line communities.

Email groups

Email groups are formed by taking a list of people and using email to build and communicate discussions between them. To ensure that each member of the discussion is invisible to the others, a special program called a list-bot is typically used that actually handles the mailing, although there are also web-based solutions.

The downside of email groups is that they can become too large for a real discussion. Everyone on the circulation list gets all the emails in the discussion and consequently in-boxes quickly fill up. In addition, where there are several threads to a conversation taking place it is difficult to keep track of which comment goes with which discussion.

Consequently it is more common to use these e-mail groups more for the dissemination of newsletters with return of information passing to a central moderator/editor, rather than to the whole list continually.

From a marketing point-of-view these type of groups can be excellent as a mechanism for building loyalty and pushing information outwards, to keep your presence high among your customers.

The most popular example of email groups is e-groups which are now on yahoo - http://groups.yahoo.com. However, you can also built email groups from lists of people registered at your site.

Buying lists to build your own email groups is not recommended as you will be face accusations of spamming.

Newsgroups

Newsgroups are probably the oldest forum for public discussion on the Internet and although well-used by aficionados awareness of newsgroups is relatively low among the Internet-using public.

From a marketing point of view, they can be a bit too technical for typical users and you do not get the same level of information or control about who views what as you do in other virtual communities.

The most common fully public forums are on Usenet (eg news:rec.humor). To use these newsgroups you need to have access to a News Server from your ISP and to use a News Reader (Microsoft Outlook has built-in news reader). It appears that these simple technical issues tend to put people off accessing news groups. However you can also access these news groups via the web (eg www.deja.com) .

Perhaps less commonly known is that companies can implement their own more private newsgroups by creating their own corporate News Server on the Internet (with password permission if necessary). Customers can then access these News Servers to contribute to discussions in much the same way that they would for the normal Usenet newsgroups.

If you use MS Outlook's News Reader and go to Tools...Accounts...Add and you can add a News Server to your list. For example if you type in news.mozilla.org when you are asked for the name of an NNTP server you will get the discussion groups for the people involved in creating an Open Source Netscape web-browser.