Building Communities that Promote Your Business

"1. a unified body of individuals ... b. the people with common interests living in a particular area, broadly, the area itself. c. an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location...." (Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition, p. 233)

Functions of Communities on the Web

Most people long to be accepted and loved and taken seriously. That, and the desire to learn, cause online communities to attract people. Word gets out about a discussion going on or a place to make personal or business contacts, and visitors are attracted. They may end up joining the community, too.

Communities on the Internet provide information. Since they tend to revolve around a particular interest or common task or hobby, they can be sources for sharing information, and become deep reservoirs of technical information. In web-ese, they "add content" to a site, and become traffic builders.

Communities also beget loyalty. Members get in the habit of returning to a site again and again. They get used to your site, and begin to develop almost a sense of ownership, especially if they are involved in an ongoing discussion.

Communities also build your business. Once people become used to your site, they're quite comfortable making a purchase from you rather than going into unknown territory? Communities build "stickiness" (the tendency to spend a long session at a particular site), and stickiness builds loyalty, loyalty builds traffic and trust, and trust is the common currency of business.

Community Structures

Newsletters

Newsletters by definition are one-way communication, and real communities require interaction. But I subscribe to some newsletters that build a sense of community by reprinting lots of "letters to the editor" and information passed on by readers. One of these is Jim Wilson's VirtualPROMOTE Gazette (http://www.virtualpromote.com/gazette1.html). Jim writes with a chatty, neighbor-down-the-hall style that invites interaction. Newsletters generally use listserver software that sends the same message to an entire list of people, and handles new subscribers and those who wish to unsubscribe. Listserver software (sometimes called a "listserv") is also the backbone for e-mail discussion lists.

Discussion Lists

One of the best ways to build a sense of community is through e-mail discussion lists. In a typical discussion list, the listserver software allows a member to send her message to the list address, and then broadcasts or echoes that message out to all the list members, all within a few minutes.

There are three types of discussion lists:

• E-Mail Discussion List. All messages from all the members are echoed to all the members as soon as they are received. If your list isn't very active, several hundred could be on such a list. But a larger list with lots of discussion can easily generate 50 to 100 e-mails per day and swamp many users. Lists can be configured so a moderator has to approve a message before it is sent on to the members to cut down on clutter. Larger lists usually offer a digest option.
• E-Mail Discussion List Digest. The digest collects all the messages sent to the list, bundles them, and e-mails them in one e-mail to subscribers either daily or when the accumulation reaches a certain size, depending upon how the list is set up. A digest helps control the level of e-mail, but tends to inhibit spontaneous interactions between members on the list.
• Moderated Discussion List Digest. Large discussion lists are eventually forced to limit the quantity and screen the quality of messages that go out to list members. A great example is the I-Sales Discussion List (http://www.audettemedia.com/i-sales/), moderated by John Audette, of MultiMedia Group, Inc. The list currently has 13,000 subscribers, and is published nearly every business day with a dozen or more high quality messages selected by the moderator from hundreds of submissions.

When people receive e-mail from the discussion list nearly every day, they begin to get acquainted other list subscribers and recognize them by their comments and hobby horses and idiosyncrasies. These various points of view make for a rich sense of community and commonality. If one member shares a problem, another will jump in with a solution that worked for them.

Discussion lists on the Internet number in the hundreds of thousands, on every conceivable kind of topic. They are often used for product support and trouble-shooting. I belong to several that discuss webmaster and e-commerce software I use in my business. They can also become support groups. If you sell orthopedic equipment, for example, your discussion list could be very valuable to people who share the same need and encounter the same problems.

If you sell hobby items, a discussion list could be a magnet for hobbyists who are happy to share their stories about radio-controlled airplane models, dollhouse collectibles, antiques -- you name it. Training groups and online classes discussions are another use. I've used discussion lists for online Bible study groups for years (http://www.joyfulheart.com/study.htm), and found them extremely effective. (See the accompanying review of four popular free mailing lists you can use in your business. http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/free-lists.htm)

Bulletin Boards

One of the struggles of e-mail-based communities is keeping "threads" (different topics of conversation) separate. Sure, the Subject line usually includes the topic, but if you are reading 15 messages a day that aren't sorted by topic, things will feel disjointed. One solution to this is a Web-based bulletin board system. Their great strengths are:

• Keeping threads separate, and
• Allowing posts to be read, searched, and researched later by individuals who may not have been part of the original conversation.

For many years I was a member of CompuServe just because of the superior message boards provided by software companies. Only here could I learn of little known fixes and patches, for example. Bulletin boards are ideal for product support, and developing an online body of information. They are widely used by Internet-based educational institutions such as ZD University (http://www.zdu.com/) and those offered by many established colleges and universities. A great example is Jim Wilson's Search Engine Forums (http://searchengineforums.com/) where you can read discussions of the latest twists and turns in the search engine position game. Bulletin boards are less "immediate" than e-mail discussions, since members need to go to the site to read messages, rather than having messages delivered to their e-mail boxes. See the accompanying review of the Ultimate Bulletin Board (http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/ultimate.htm) that now powers our Web Marketing & E-Commerce Forum (http://www.wilsonweb.com/forum/).

Chat Rooms

The final type of community building tool is the chatroom. With the huge popularity of chat on AOL and the Internet as a whole, you may be surprised that I cover this last. This is because I think chat rooms are of more limited use for most businesses. Of course, if you have an apparel line for Gen-Xers looking for hot chicks, a chat room may increase your traffic. But most business chat rooms I have visited are empty, except for hours-old pitiful queries: "Is anybody here (echo: here, HERE)?"

Sometimes PR people schedule chats and interviews with famous personalities, and this can be an intense experience. But for nearly all business uses, chats must be scheduled ahead of time in order to get enough people gathered around the same topic to have a meaningful discussion. If your small business needs a chat room, web hosting services often have no- or low-cost rooms available. eGroups has a Java-based chat room built into their online list areas, if you need an occasional facility, but participants all need to register as group members to use the chat room.

Necessary Elements

What's necessary to build a successful community? A lot of care and planning are involved. But be sure to have a:

• Clear focus for the community that makes sense to prospective members
• Technical capability through your own software and hardware or a free service
• Structure, guidelines, and parameters for the discussion to keep the group on target
• Moderator responsible for each group or list
• Clear strategy for how the community will benefit your business. Communities take a lot of maintenance, so it has to achieve something to make it worth your while.

The Bottom Line

Just what effect can you expect a community to have on your business's profit and loss statement?

• Customer satisfaction through effective customer support is difficult to measure, but the availability of customer support will make your product or service more attractive, and therefore affect sales.
• Increased traffic will produce more traffic. You're now offering a service that participants will tell their friends about, and news media will write stories about.
• Repeated use will develop loyalty.
• Moderating or sponsoring a group puts you in the role of an expert in the industry and gives you and your business high visibility.
• Narrowly focused groups you sponsor will attract your very best prospects -- those who have a clear interest in your product or service.
• When your list is well-developed you can earn some advertising revenue from e-mail ads or banner ads, but don't start a list expecting this to be your primary revenue stream -- it probably won't develop this way for probably a year or two, if at all.

What's Right for You?

Building a community can be an extremely valuable strategy in developing your online business. But one warning: if you treat communities as novelties to set up and then desert, they'll soon become a negative rather than a positive. Make sure your community building strategy is part of a carefully designed business plan that you are committed to maintain over the long term.