The Potential of Company-Owned Online Communities

According to Wikipedia, an online community is “an organized group of people who communicate with each other on the Internet (…)”. The important thing is that it shares a common interest that unites them. As a platform, Wikipedia mentions social media channels.

I would like to add to this view. Community is much more than social media; communities can be built very successfully on a company’s own website as a My area. This setup may not be as fast as on existing social media channels, but it offers the advantage that the platform belongs to the company (“owned media”) and it can maintain the community there more individually and interact with its customers in a more targeted way. However, you can learn a lot about how communities work by closely following the groups of companies and organizations on social media.

Short answer: for anyone who has an interest that they cannot pursue alone, but for which they need comrades-in-arms. This applies to political parties, companies, sports clubs, NGOs, and media companies. They all cannot exist without their members, customers, fans, readers and followers. An active, loyal community acts as a catalyst for their goals, creates predictability in the form of a fixed membership base, and helps to retain their own customers in the long term.

Sure, repeat customers have been around for as long as there have been companies to convince their customers of what they have to offer. What is new are the digital possibilities and tools that are available today for community management. Modern customer portals offer their users the opportunity to build completely different communities for different target groups, be they customers, suppliers, association members or fans, to name a small selection. In this way, organizations can take up input from their stakeholders, exchange ideas with them, and generate valuable interactions.

Modern marketing puts the customer at the center of entrepreneurial action. The marketing department is the first advocate for the customer in any organization. Marketing strategies are thus the interface and starting point for strategies from other areas of the company.

Community building, as a new marketing discipline, now puts the customer’s digital community at the center. This enables the contact data of members to be better enriched, which forms the basis for personalized addressing, individual products and services. This creates new cross-selling and upselling potential.

You should ask yourself these five questions to find out whether your own community has potential for your organization:

• Is customer loyalty relevant for your company?
• Is it important for you to know what your stakeholders think about you and your products?
• Do you sell products and/or services with cross-selling potential?
• Do you want to engage in an active exchange with your customers?
• Do you want your customers to promote you?

If you answer yes to at least three of these questions, you should seriously consider building your own community for your organization.

The Swiss food retailer Migros has created its own community, “Migipedia”, in which members can exchange ideas with each other and with the company. The focus here is on user-generated content. A rating system gives members an incentive to publish articles, which in turn generate more traffic for the community and thus for Migros.

One successful example from Germany is Vorwerk, a manufacturer of household appliances with a long tradition.

Vorwerk has always emphasized direct sales – first offline with vacuum cleaners like the “Kobold” and then very successfully online with kitchen machines like the “Thermomix.” In 2009, Vorwerk set up a community platform with recipe ideas for the Thermomix, which already had more than 72,000 recipes on it in 2018. It has become a fixed, identity-forming component of the product and an important sales lever.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts – this is especially true for communities. If you gather your target groups – customers, suppliers, fans, members – and offer them an effective platform for meeting and exchanging ideas, you will be pleasantly surprised by the results. Good luck!