The Church of the Customer Blog by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba is a great source of information for evangelizing, marketing, and managing an online community. I included Ben McConnell’s “10 marketing resolutions for 2008” in a post below because I find them to be so relevant. I also want to address another post that he had a couple months ago. In the blog he asks, “what type of community, exactly, do you want to create?” Here are the four possible ways to describe a community:
- Clique
- Network
- Cult
- Nation
These 4 communities exists on a scale, the axis representing ‘size’ and ‘devotion.’ Therefore, a Nation represents the greatest scale with the most fervent users, while a clique is the smallest in scale with the least devoted users. When creating a social media site, I imagine everyone starts off with a clique community. Every site must begin with a core group of users, who most likely share many similar traits (such as, they are related to or are friends with the developers). Even a large networking site like LinkedIn at one point started as a clique/niche site. There were probably other social networking sites similar to LinkedIn that were existence several years ago. So how come LinkedIn broke through while other sites did not? Did LinkedIn offer superior services and a better performing platform, or did they just get lucky? LinkedIn successfully positioned itself as a social networking site that focuses on professional relationships, which was probably unique at the time. But were they first to the market? Is that what it takes sometimes – to be the first player in a market that people notice? I don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know, in life, sometimes it is better to be lucky than to be good.
LinkedIn is also unique in that they are able to get many customers to actually pay to use their service. The business is built around premium services. The average user pays $200 to $300 a year, some pay over $2,000 a year. It is hard to imagine any users on the Internet paying a subscription service fee to use a social networking site. In this day and change, a company that charges a subscription fee is just providing an opportunity for a competitor to come and offer that same service for free. I would like to know about any social media site that has a revenue model that is not ad-bases. According to Ben McConnell in the Church of the Customer, that model is us – word of mouth. “It’s a sustainable, long-term form of word of mouth that can build brands. There’s countless ways to think about making that happen, which is part of the challenge.” Even they are trying to monetize on word of mouth by creating a Ning site based upon that very concept – The Society of Word of Mouth (SWOM) -
