Bloghound

After digesting last week’s Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas, here are the top 10 ideas that emerged from the wisdom (and energy) of the crowd.

1. Community must have a specific purpose. And that purpose must be clear and transparent to members. The purpose of the community shapes the form of the community and success metrics.

2. Measurement and demonstrating quantifiable business value is critical. Peter Friedman of Live World suggested that if the community purpose is clear, the ROI should be easy to calculate. e.g., if the purpose is to engage customers of a major cable subscriber service in such a way that they will extend their contracts for one additional month, the incremental revenue will be $100 million.

3. Passion and complexity engage people. People are most drawn to communities around topics that they are either passionate about – or are so complex that people want to get involved to get advice from others.

4. The experience needs to be interesting and fun. While some agreed that communities don’t need to be functionally complex—a Yahoo Group could be considered a community – most concurred that the overall user experience needs to be really fun, intuitive, and offer activities from posting to video sharing. MySpace believes this is one reason it zoomed passed Friendster.

5. Analytics and archiving to make sense of what’s going on the community are the killer apps. Only with these tools can marketers more quickly see patterns, glean valuable insights from what’s going in the community. Appears to be big pent up interest in these analytics.

6. People matter more than the tools. In other words, the people who design and facilitate the community are more crucial to the community’s success than the technology platform and tools on which the community runs. Several people noted that companies need new types of talent to oversee communities, and that talent is in short supply.

7. It takes a while for a community to gel. You can’t say the community is open and expect lots of activity to happen overnight. People need to get to know the community, the people in it, the brand behind it, and the value in it for them before they will get actively involved.

8. Authenticity rules. If the community’s raison d’etre is not sincere and real, people in the community will sniff it out and kill the community.

9. Community is the second most important brand asset after your product/service. People often interact with your community more than any other part of your brand except the product/service itself. Hence, don’t screw up your community – it’s becoming an essential part of your brand.

10. People want to connect with people: this is the reason why 2.0 communities emerging. People don’t want to engage with ads, anonymous help desks, or focus groups. They want to connect with other people who share the same passions or interests. Several people noted that communities aren’t just online, many are likely to be hybrids, say meeting once a year face-to-face, and then carrying on conversations online.

Community 2.0

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