Traditionally, the word "community" conjures up village fairs or small groups of like-minded people getting together, but it has taken on quite a different meaning with the internet.
It was not always this way. The first internet communities bore some relation to the original meaning of the word, formed by groups of scientists or people with shared interests, a world vividly and enthusiastically portrayed by Howard Rheingold in his classic 1993 book, The Virtual Community. Now "community" conjures up an image of commerce as much as of cosy fellowship.
Go to any networking event, sooner or later someone with a new website or about to create one will utter the word like a mantra. Entrepreneurs harp on about community for several reasons. First, the larger the membership of an online community, the greater the number of advertisers attracted. Second, the community represents a mini mass-market for companies as the market becomes increasingly fragmented.
With the advent of the internet, that hoary old chestnut, "the customer is king", becomes more of a reality. Customers can browse for bargains, making it difficult for a company to build up customer loyalty. The internet is a paradox: It creates a virtual global market yet fractures it into millions of pieces at the same time.
Take Amazon.com. The online bookseller says it can ship to virtually any address around the globe, so the world is its oyster in a sense. The only problem is that other companies such as Barnes and Noble, its bricks and mortar rival, also sell books on the net. If Barnes and Noble offers better service and cheaper books, customers may desert Amazon with the speed of its tumbling share prices. Amazon's defence is to build up a sense of loyalty and community.
In building up a community, Amazon also acquires data about customers. This data amounts to a valuable currency because the more a company knows about its clients, the better placed it is to offer them what they want, although it has to take care not to rile them over-eager marketing. Because of this database, Amazon can exploit the information to sell other products besides books, which is why it has branched into other areas such as tools and hardware, beauty products and electronics. Amazon is creating a virtual department store based on the relationships that have been developed through its client base.
"Amazon is more than just about selling books," says Gerard Davies, an internet consultant. "It's about forming relationships and managing those relationships."
The community thus is no longer a group of like-minded fellows, swapping jokes and recipes but a potential commercial nirvana to corporations. That is why entrepreneurs like Michael Zur-Szpiro, who has set up a site for home buyers and sellers called Mooov.com, harp on such much about community. The site - one of several devoted to the housing market - invites people to share their horror stories and runs stories about celebrities and their stories about moving.
With the importance of communities, a whole new industry has cropped up around community building on the net. Amy Jo Kim, who has been building online communities for 10 years for companies like America Online and webzines, has written a useful guide for community builders. She sets down a number of fundamental principles, such as the importance of designing a site that can adapt to the changing needs of its members and of creating and maintaining feedback loops.
"Successful community building is a constant balancing act between the efforts of management (that's you) to plan, organise and run the space, and the ideas, suggestions and needs of your members," she writes. Other community gurus such as Cliff Figallo, part of the Futurize Now consulting group in San Francisco, also stress the importance of listening to community members.
But as desirable as it is for companies to build or tap into communities, such close links to consumers can bring risks. Proximity to users gives companies a treasure-trove of data to exploit, but mistakes can be magnified to an embarrassing degree. Push the wrong button and a message can zip its way to the wrong person. Worse still, the wrong message can go to thousands of people by mistake. If that happens, companies have to be pro-active and apologise immediately.
Companies really have to listen to customers instead of merely paying lip service to the notion. Mr Davis says companies are horrified when he urges them to give out the managing director's email address on their websites. What happens when he gets inundated with emails? He replies: "It's a quick way of knowing if a company has got a problem, isn't it? So it's a good way of making sure the company doesn't make mistakes."
mark.tran@theguardian.com
Useful links
Naima.com
Futurizenow.com
