One to One Interactive | eCommunity is an important part of the B2B internet marketing mix

Community is a concept with many possible definitions. I define community within the context of Business to Business Internet marketing as a group of business people with shared interests who interact electronically to communicate about those shared interests. For a community sponsoring firm, a community should be about initiating and sustaining productive and profitable customer relationships that add value to the customer-product lifecycle.

Forrester Analyst Daniel O'Brien writes, "Emerging online communities of customers and partners are precursors to full-time eBusiness networks. Companies that listen, participate, and distill community insights will improve product development, marketing, and customer support." A McKinsey study found that eCommunity users are twice as likely to purchase your products, twice as likely to remain a customer and will use your eCommunity application nine times more frequently than non-members. McKinsey further found that eCommunity applications can lower customer service costs by up to 25% relative to tele-service and can save up to 30% in product development costs as a result of increased collaboration.

The benefits of integrating an eCommunity application within your Internet Marketing mix include:

A community is not passive. A community requires organizational alignment, commitment and a clear business focused strategy with disciplined execution to deliver fresh content, active management and key business intelligence. Further, while membership should be targeted, don't think that community is only about your existing customers. Because the essence of Community is a shared interest, know that prospects have a shared interest in learning how you can help them solve their business problems. In addition, the more personalized your community the more likely members will find what they are looking for, interact and add value to your business.

Community features must be easy and fun to use enabling both synchronous (e.g. chat or IM) and asynchronous (e.g. discussion lists, bulletin boards and e-mail) communication. But more important, the community must receive fresh, relevant, and timely content of real business value. Content will derive from many sources within the community including the sponsoring business. However it is critical that community members are empowered to share positive and negative ideas, concepts and feelings about their shared interests (your firm and its products). Allowing open and fluid but not libelous or disruptive communication will promote the free flow of ideas that will help you improve your business.

One To One Interactive has been working with Unisys for nearly three years providing strategic, design, development and analytical services for their first corporate eCommunity application. For Unisys, eCommunity is becoming a strategic component of demand chain management delivering many of the business benefits mentioned above. For more information, see the Unisys eCommunity case study featured in this issue.

Whether you realize it or not, there is a community of interest surrounding your firm and its products. By developing and promoting an eCommunity to facilitate interaction and collaboration among your stakeholders including customers, prospects, suppliers, distributors, products, emarketplaces, sales channels, partners, vendors, employees, industry analysts and press you can participate in the information and knowledge exchange. This participation will improve the efficiency of your customer-product life cycle and delivering more enduring and profitable customer relationships.