Forrester have published a pretty good taxonomy, based on the business objectives you have, for branded online communities. Communities can be set up for you to;
- Listen to your customers
- Talk to your customers
- Energise your advocates
- Support your customers (or let them support each other)
- Embrace your customers (we prefer to call this one 'co-creation', the objective being to include your customers in the design of new products and services)
(I note that the 2008 Forrester Groundswell Awards added 3 more types; Managing, Social Impact and Company Transformation - it is really the last of these I would like to discuss in this post)
In our experience, it is foolhardy to launch a community without serious company intention to implement 1. Listen.
Why else would a customer give you the gift of their time on your site unless it is because they expect to be listened to? So whatever else you plan to achieve with your community, be serious about listening.... and then proving you have listened by responding, doing something with the customer input. Even if that is saying 'cannot' and explaining why.
There can be resistance to customer input!
The reason why social media strategies cannot be quarantined into the marketing department?
It's because (I can guarantee this) the customers will not suggest you help them by using less comic sans in your email offers.
If you genuinely ask customers for advice on how to be a better company (i.e. a more successful, engaging brand) they will suggest you change your product, your pricing, your service, something to do with your customer value proposition.
And Marketing rarely has control over these things, or the authority to change them in response to customer requests, no matter how unanimous the crowd is in asking. So you need to negotiate, persuade, convince other departments that the customers actually do know - better than you do - what customers want from your existing offerings.
This means that social media strategies, if you are really interested in an open and authentic conversation with customers, quickly become political projects, not marketing campaigns.
You open up to customers, they join the conversation, they expect you to respond and implement if you can - as in a normal conversation - and you (Marketing) cannot unless you have the support and enthusiasm of product and service managers.
Best to have a discussion and gain this support before you launch the community. So your colleagues do not think you are holding a loaded customer gun to their head later - who wants to be accused of being 'customer-uncaring' in this enlightened post-CRM era?
This is why the first 'E' in our implementation methodology; 'ECHOES' addresses the need to Embed customers in the processes likely to be affected by a social media implementation. Or the priceless ideas you get from your customer advocates may be strangled for the wrong reasons...
Marketing introduce a 'Surprise!' idea from their customer community
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