Build your own community or go where people already are? Do both and integrate!

I just read Matt Rhode’s “Build your own community or go where people are? Do both” blog entry and was compelled to add to it with my own blog entry beyond just my usual retweet gesture because this issue has become an FAQ lately for many organizations I’ve talked to. My answer is not just to do both but to integrate as well. The Telligent customer showcase for the Orthodox Christian Fellowship community provides a prime example of the benefits for both members (seamless user experience) as well as the organization (membership growth).

The reason why there is a growing need to integrate brand communities with social (and professional) networks should be obvious – it’s because the networks are growing exponentially faster than any brand community. So, organizations can continue to invest in and depend on the typically low conversation rates of SEO and direct marketing to attract people to their communities, or they can leverage the connections that people have in the various networks.

So why not just create a community in those networks, be it a brand page on Facebook or a group on LinkedIn? Because there’s a continuum of connections, contexts, and interactions along with the need to measure and analyze them that the networks cannot effectively accommodate, but a community platform like Telligent’s can. Here’s a model that I recently introduced in my “Being "social" is just one aspect of the modern business life cycle” blog entry.

Every organization has a goal of cultivating business relationships to the point where teams of people with strong ties can work together to achieve one or more objectives. One of the most effective ways to build a strong team is to select people from communities of interest or practice, where members have weak ties that are relevant to or aligned with the objective, rather than from a rigid structure of command or seniority where people have zero, irrelevant, or misaligned ties. That’s why it has become business critical for so many organizations to establish, grow, and sustain communities of employees, customers, and partners.

The typical community life cycle has 3 key steps related to growing and optimizing community membership:

1. Attracting new members
2. Identifying MVPs and/or influencers
3. Setup teams and/or special interest groups to optimize members’ attention

At the beginning of the Grow phase in the community life cycle shown above, social and professional networks provide an abundance of potential members to attract. About 1/2 or 2/3 into the Grow phase, there should be enough members and activities to identify MVPs and influencers using metrics and analytics that the networks don’t or can’t provide. Lastly, to ensure smooth sailing toward the Transition phase, groups will need to be setup to accommodate the needs of people, who have established strong ties with each other within the community. The flexibility (branding, content filtering, security roles, etc.) needed for these groups are not available on the networks. Setting up these groups doesn’t need to wait until the latter half of the Sustain/Renew phase, but that’s the last point in the life cycle to do so in order to prevent people from leaving the community due to “too much noise.”

So, in conclusion, to be successful in the modern business life cycle of the Web 2.0 era, you must implement your own community as well as integrate it with the appropriate networks.