Giving Online Communities space to grow

 “I told a friend and she told two friends and so on and so on…” Those words come from a famous seventies commercial campaign for a shampoo. It was ingenious in that it not only recognized the power of word-of-mouth advertising, but capitalised on it by promoting a brand that had that very power.All the clever advertising in the world doesn’t carry the weight that a friend or trusted personal source has regarding product recommendations. Getting the thumbs up from someone you trust whose opinion comes from experience makes all the difference for most of us.In a report on word-of-mouth advertising, Lithium Technologies looks at its power and how the web and social media has affected it. The report looks at online communities and SNA or Social Network Analysis. For this post, I’ll focus on online communities and address SNA in a follow up post.Online enthusiast communities have been recognized for some time now for their power in promoting via word-of-mouth and as a breeding ground for brand advocates. Supporting and monitoring online communities where enthusiasts who use your brand can gather and discuss their experiences is a primary way to identify and nurture influencers online whose opinions carry weight in the community.For example, as described by Building Customer Networks for Successful Word of Mouth Marketing: "A member’s community rank is a practical indicator of influence. As behaviour drives rank, those with higher ranks tend to be long standing members, people who have invested more time in the community, and people whose opinions carry more weight with other members."Online communities can take several forms (forums, blogs, social networks) and must be the foundation of any kind of consumer outreach. Communities are much like coral, as they grow, they attract others to the community and create more dynamic interactions. It’s up to marketers to respect the space that allows the coral to form and to nurture the growth around it.It is essential to engage with members who are involved in the administering of their community. You don’t have the time or resources to manage it 24/7 and in any case, you won’t be so effective in leading the community because these communities run themselves. The idea here is to identify those members who want to be directly involved with you and to engage with them.Here are some basic rules to follow. Your primary strategy should be to make yourself accessible to the community leaders and to offer guidance and information when they need it – that means right when they ask for it. This is critical because if the community leaders don’t feel the love, they will abandon it and the community will die.Enthusiast communities are not new, but never before have we had the power to interact with them and nurture their influence as we have now with the web. We are not just talking about a few folks chatting about your product or brand at a donut shop any more – that donut shop is now global and powerful.