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Best Practice Community Types

Best Practice Community Types
Posted Thu, 29/01/2009 - 12:25

Awareness has launched a set of Best Practice Communities based on what they say are the top eight social media marketing use cases and business goals.
 
The communities are as follows (with Awareness' own descriptions):

  1. Corporate Voice Community: Facilitate a dialog with your audience in a personal, "humanized" voice that builds trust through ongoing conversation.
  2. User-Generated Content/Microsite Campaign: Build demand for your products and services through a contest or other viral marketing program and encourage interaction among users through content submission and voting on the submissions of others.
  3. Enthusiasts Community: Increase brand awareness by stimulating a common passion in your audience while encouraging members to share thoughts and ideas.
  4. Associations/Subscribers Community: Increase customer satisfaction through an exclusive, "velvet-rope" community for customers, association members, or subscribers.
  5. Loyalty Community: Enhance customer loyalty by communicating with and rewarding your top customers.
  6. Innovation Community: Generate new product ideas by encouraging customers share ideas and knowledge.  Provide a forum to rate customer ideas for product and service enhancements in order to, confirm or modify current product plans, and turn potentially negative feedback into constructive criticism.
  7. Peer Support Community: Reduce customer service and support costs by providing a vehicle for community members to solve others' problems.
  8. Event Community: Build and maintain buzz leading up to and following an event.

 
The idea for classifying the communities into these type was created because Marketers want to know that their social media initiatives are aligned with their business goals and can be rapidly deployed and have a clear way to measure success."Our goal is to provide marketers with an easy-to-use, low risk solution to deploy social media marketing." (CEO John Bruce)
 
More details can be found in the original article.
 
 
What do you think about these types? Could you think of any other communty types?

Business Fights Poverty: Using social networks to create a better world ›
Dan Marotta

Hybrid Communities

Submitted by Dan Marotta on Thu, 19/11/2009 - 17:43.

Daniela,
 
I wanted to bring up a concern for me around a Peer Support Community. Where it's ideal that members resolve their peers' issues, thereby reducing corporate customer service and support costs. But what if the solution provided is incorrect or misleading? Is it the responsbility of the company to step in and make those corrections? Especially if its ocurring on the company-hosted community.
 
To put it into context, I'm in the beginning stages of creating a strategy for what Awareness calls, an Enthusiasts Community. We want our customers to to share all the great things they're doing with our software, but since the industry we're in is technical by nature, I can't help but think that conversations will take on characteristics that of a support community.
 
So although Awareness delineates communities into these 8 buckets, I would think that there are communties that are hybrids
 
Dan

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