Virtual Community Marketing
including Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, and P2P
(Peer-to-Peer and Progressive-to-Progressive) initiatives
True virtual communities, in the original sense,
assembled themselves around shared interests and/or obsessions, whether
professional or personal, using newsgroups, then listservs, and most
recently on web-based forums. These technologies provided their members
with environments where they could share the data and lore of an arcane topic
with other devotees of that field. In the current
"web entrepreneurship" era, these
ideas have evolved into business strategies. An
affiliation-based marketing strategy, when successful, identifies a
niche market of consumers who "represent" a community, but are really
only an assemblage of customers. They share an interest in certain
products or in the perceived commercial value a brand represents, but little
else. This is
not the same as membership in an online social group with a shared set of
values. Most large, successful Internet
marketers call their brand or affiliation strategies virtual communities,
regardless that they only mimic them. They understand that affiliation communities
have extraordinary stickiness (eager members who participate regularly) and
so they attempt to create the
feeling of community where it may not naturally exist, by courting their
customers into feeling a sense of community. They evoke these feelings of
intimacy and loyalty through a combination of personalization technologies and a
program of e-mail outreach. A virtual
community is truly achieved when the participants want it to exist, need it to
exist, find it useful and satisfying, and use it to maintain personal
relationships with individuals and sub-groups, regardless of the intent of the
community developers. The next step in the evolution of
virtual communities is the economic virtual community, which is essentially a co-op buying plan in cyberspace. This new and advanced
business model is likely to be the wave of the future, according to a number of
very smart people. We particularly recommend
you read the book, Net Gains, by John Hagel III and Arthur Armstrong. The sub-title
says it all, "expanding markets through virtual communities". These highly regarded McKinsey & Co. consultants explain, in rigorous
B-school fashion, how economic virtual communities will out-compete current
sales strategies in convincing style early in the 21st century. PIA is
committed to exploring the development of economic virtual communities, and is
looking for clients and alliance partners with the vision and resources to
pursue this innovative strategy.
Ready to get
started? Call
Dick Jones to discuss our services, or email DickJones AT pia.net
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