Online Communities for Executives?
Online customer communities are all the rage in business these days – and for good reason. As consultant Patty Seybold noted recently, customer communities “push the envelope” for their sponsors with positive results in a number of areas, including business policies, brand experience, customer support, and research and development.
As the benefits become clearer, according to Seybold, the case for raising these communities to the strategic level becomes stronger. Indeed, participants at her recent gathering of “customer-centric executives” suggested that leaders of online customer communities are moving up the bureaucratic ranks and reporting into the top of the business.
Do online communities work for senior executives, however? John Hagel, a pioneering thinker and consultant on online communities since the mid-1990s, suggests that there are three dimensions to managing successful online communities:
- Content – effectively integrating published content with contributed content, making it easily accessible
- Social interactions – catalyzing and sustaining rewarding interactions among participants in ways that promote the creation of enduring relationships
- Economic business models – establishing rewarding and sustainable economics to support the growth of virtual communities
Hagel’s three dimensions provide a useful guide to the challenge, and companies trying to build online communities at the executive level cannot skimp on any of them. Perhaps as important, though, is integrating face-to-face with the online component.
Executives, like the rest of us, are always looking for new ideas, new contacts, and useful conversation. The reality, however, is that they are so starved for time and so jaded by the bombardment of sales pitches and requests that they are least likely to try things that might not be worth their time. As such, the most likely route to a successful online community for executives is building one face-to-face where they can vet the participants and the value in more intimate settings (e.g., with live executive forums or advisory boards). Slowly and carefully adding an online resource to programs that already bring together executives in live settings is therefore the best way to start. In other words, if the community isn’t already in at least nascent existence offline, it’s probably not worth trying to build it online.
RBL
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Reader Comments (1)
When did trading in our own life purpose, our own passion and vision for ourselves as powerful creative beings, become so decreased in value that we seek out empty, faceless online communities in an attempt to find the answer?
Why not take a bold, brave step into the world on our own as visionaries and creators of our own dreams? Would you do it if you found a real live community of like-minded people who'd done it already? And what if these people could show you a way to replace your corporate income and still pursue your dreams? Would you do it? We can show you how.