The fundamental nature of online communities and their benefits don't change just because the economy has taken a change for the worse.  Even a whole lot worse... What does change of course, is the quantum of benefits (ie. less consumers reaching for their credit cards...) and the scrutiny that all marketing activities will receive from corporate decision-makers. This brings into sharp relief the inevitable comparisons across the marketing mix. This is a good thing...  if you are prepared!

So start thinking about the measures used in other channels and then take advantage of the versatility of online communities and social media generally. An example from Groundswell that examines the benefits of an Executive Blog:

• Advertising value: visibilty/traffic (estimate 7,500 daily page views at a $2.50 cost per thousand)
• PR value: press stories about/driven from blog content (estimate 24 stories at a value of $10K each)
• Word-of-mouth value: referring posts on other medium- to high-profile blogs (estimate 370 posts at a  value of $100 each)
• Support value: support calls avoided because of information on the blog (estimate 50 daily support calls avoided at $5.50 per call)
• Research value: customer insights (estimate comments/feedback equivalent to 5 focus groups at $8K each)

We have spoken previously about the support and research benefits of online communities but it is worth checking off all alternative marketing activities for the comparative measure. Other comparative aspects in the marketing mix worth re-visiting are those of risk and measurement. For most social media initiatives, the cost of failure is cheap - relative to other marketing channels, particularly "above the line" channels. And because performance online is measureable, the ability to learn quickly from successes and failures is far greater than other channels. A timely reminder of the famous quote from John Wanamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"