HotHouse makes brands work for people online

Online brand communities take a lot of work and time to nurture and grow. How do you know they’re providing value for your company? Some recent work in this area includes:

• Online Community ROI (Return on Investment) TCO Analysis (Total Cost of Ownership) – this worksheet helps you work out ROI and TCO for implementing an online community or social network.

• Online Community ROI – A collection of statistics that build a solid case for building online brand communities. Accompanying PowerPoint here.

• Measuring Success in Online Communities – Summary of a presentation on the topic at the recent NewComm Forum.  Accompanying PowerPoint here.

• Measuring the Success of Online Communities: the academic view – a link to articles on this topic in Google Scholar.

• How do you measure success online? – A blog and robust set of comments on the topic on the Econsultancy website.

Although the Internet is renown for embracing new ideas, chewing them up, spitting them out and moving on to the next one, a few concepts keep coming back, albeit in new forms.

The most resilient of these is the concept of communities.  They’re in vogue again, for exactly the same reasons they have been in vogue in the past – the concept of community aptly describes the nature and the potential of the online environment.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a piece for the “My Five” column in the Australian Literary Review, where people write about five books that have influenced them in their career.  The first book I listed was Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities.

Net Gain was one of the first books that put Internet communities into a business context: not surprising, since authors John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong were both McKinsey&Company consultants. They argued that the web is used for three basic purposes – to find content, to interact and to complete transactions – and they correctly predicted online communities would grow around these purposes.

The book was strongly criticised by purists when it was published; they said that on the Internet there was commerce and there was community and never the twain shall meet. Not long after this, of course, eBay appeared. eBay is the textbook example of the type of virtual communities predicted by Hagel and Armstrong: a vibrant, self‐regulated community where people barter and sell, and make friends (and dollars) along the way.

They also forecast the disintermediation of industries such as travel, describing a future that looks a lot like travel sites such as Zuji, Wotif and TripAdvisor.

read more