Who's building communities online? A broad array of companies provide different online community services. If you're looking for an idea generator, feedback loop, and loyalty builder, you can try making a private community of 300-500 handpicked contributors. Hire a company like my client, the Boston-based Communispace. They've been running private online communities (as a hosted, turn-key service from recruitment through data analysis) for the Fortune 1000 since 1999, and have a startling 100% client renewal rate. Lately, others have seen the potential of this space and have started to jump into it, including San Francisco's MarketTools with their new product Insight Networks, which appears to have worked with one client so far (Del Monte).
If you prefer something short-term, Socratic Technologies, a San Francisco based Internet research, survey and panel firm, offers Socratic WebBoards, a recruited and fully moderated virtual focus group that takes place over a couple of days.
If you'd like to share a large panel of consumers with other companies (as opposed to recruiting your own custom community), P&G has just begun to implement online communities to enable conversation among members of their Tremor and VocalPoint panels (teens and moms respectively).
Liveworld, formerly TalkCity, has repositioned itself as a private label online community builder and is now 10% owned by WPP. They've been around for a long time, delivered over a million hours of moderation, are fully international, and build and host large public communities for the purposes of loyalty marketing and customer support. I'm not sure whether they offer small private communities and data analysis or not, and anyone who has any more information about any of these providers or their competitors should feel free to add their comments. I've only gleaned most of this information from reading their websites.
Lots of other application providers and software companies exist that will build a public community for you online, but few of them have learned to provide recruitment, moderation, and analysis services as well (Lithium out of Emeryville CA is one of the few as far as I can tell). I see great potential in the online community-building space as soon as the technology companies learn what ad agencies know, or vice versa. Affinitive, Neighborhood America, CivicSpace, iUpload, and Jive Software all have terrific potential to expand and meet a full complement of corporate online-community building needs in the near future.
Dozens of other market research firms and marketing firms also offer what they call "communities" for research and brand advocacy - Informative out of San Francisco is one that has a collection of great clients and seems a step ahead. However, perusal of some of these companies' marketing materials indicates that in many cases they don't value, highlight or enable the many-to-many nature of community, where the point is people are talking to each other. They host adaptive surveys or send e-newsletters, which are both fine methods of communication, but they are both one-way: participant to company or company to participant.
True communities are participant-to-participant -- this is what the companies that started out on the web understand, that the agencies that have a background in offline marketing and messaging have such trouble learning. Additions, questions, complaints, feel free to comment here.
CivicSpace has what we call an "associate" program. Anyone can pre-configure and resell a CivicSpace-based ASP. We'd love to partner with consultants and other online community specialists that need a robust open source technology partner.
Posted by: David Geilhufe | October 27, 2006 at 09:43 PM
Interesting post. Online communities clearly can benefit a diverse range of industry.
Posted by: GMI | January 09, 2007 at 09:45 AM