I have talked in a previous post about online conversations that don't go anywhere - evidently serving some form of purpose for customers without providing any value for the brand; indeed, just committing the marketer to an endless stream of content challenges!

[caption id="attachment_268" align="aligncenter" width="268" caption="And your point was?"][/caption]

Fear not! The ever accumulating marketing experience (positive&negative...) in these online communities, including some of our own clients, provides some clues!

It may come as a surprise that planning & conversational structure play an important in the success of online communities. At a high level, the conversational cycle goes as follows for example:

- Recruit & Qualify: "We want to hear from you"

- Survey: "What matters most", "Your suggestions?", Your peer suggestions?"

- Results & Interpretation: "Here's what you, and your peers, said", "Here's the order in which you and your peers prioritised it" and "Thank you!"

- Action: "Here's what we're doing about it", "Please stay in touch"

Within this planning framework, there are also tactics that can be employed to frame a conversation. So for example when we ask an open-ended question - where community members initiate their own ideas and vote on the ideas of others - the brand is able the "seed ideas". These ideas are the first ideas that are seen and voted on by community members - helping the brand to frame the conversation. As is turns out, brand seeded ideas are very rarely the ideas that float to the top (our experience is that only one in ten brand seeded ideas make the top ten...). Nonetheless, the seeded ideas are instrumental in clarifying the purpose of the question. 

Now I certainly do not wish to create the illusion that we, as the brand or the community moderators can control online conversation - but a combination of moderator's role, choice of conversational forum and content planning - all help in callibrating the conversation itself and the value to brand - and indeed to the community.