We see a lot of corporates showing interest in communities these days. Many focus on building their own communities or playing a role in large generalistic communities like Youtube, Facebook, or Dutch case Hyves.

Successfully starting and maintaining a consumer community is difficult and takes a long time to do so. I would estimate chances of success around 1%-2%.

Using large generalistic communities for your communication in a way is quite similar to the traditional mass marketing. Even though companies are utilizing new methods, like virals, the audience is quite broad and communication remains expensive, just like in the days of push marketing on radio, TV, and print.

Why is so much budget flowing to projects with such low chances of success? I would like to share another perspective to working with communities.

I remember the late 90′s where CRM and data mining were big buzz words. And with some companies they still are. The point is to analyse data to find homogeneous groups to better fine-tune our proposition and communication. The interesting thing is that specialised communities are such homogeneous and focused groups.

The Harley Davidson Community in the picture below is a great example. This group consists of people that cherish their machine, the ‘Harley life’, and other Harley people. I think that a lot of marketeers could easily decide if this group is interesting to them, and if yes, make them a good proposition with a relatively limited investment.

Therefore, with specialised communities your CRM or data mining has been done for you and you can skip right to making the community a crisp proposition that suits them. To my mind this is low hanging fruit that can be harvested with small investments and quick returns. I have yet to speak to a marketeer from a large corporation who has realised this and acted upon it.