The push of Brand communities is steady with new websites controled by brands or simply branded blowing every week.
Does a Brand need to open a blog in order to be fair play and start a real two-way communication with its costumers? Starbucks (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/home/home.jsp), as many other companies, ask the same question: Are U satisfied? Starbucks only follows what its Canadian concurrent did in Canada long time ago with… nothing more :+)
Do a brand need to keep its community inside the boundaries of the Brand when creating a community? Is it the right strategy?
Looking back to the history of social network, there was dating website. As for every new technology, sex is the main driver for early adopters.
With the huge success of online dating websites, all news papers adopted a dating on their website. What news paper’s website do have a dating service today? Huge firms as meetic.com, match.com took over the market.
So will it be the same for Brand communities?
This is a question I had to ask myself while creating www.hairmust.com community, the Loreal Professionnel community.
Is the interest for the brand wide enough to lead a sufficient traffic so that the community will be alive? And if yes, will it be sufficient to survive next wave of absorption (that will surely happen in the future)?
I don’t think so.
This is the reason why I decided to open the community to a larger public than only Loreal Pro admirers. I was also lead by the last researches showing that brand admirers are not, as we used to think, the target persons we have to reach with our community. Brand consumers are the right targets as brand admirers are not word-of-mouth white flags as they are so extremists that they are not trusted more than the brand itself is. In add, they are so focused that they are not meeting other stratus of the population.
I decided to focus the community on hair dressers and beauty lovers.
This mix seems to me the right one as hairdressers are motivated to produce content (photos in our case) and beauty lovers are interested in choosing the right hair dresser or discovering the new trend (not in catalogues, but in real). The brand in this story? The brand is the guarantor of the quality, the initiator of the new trend. In construction, we would say the Quality control.
This structure solves somehow one of the most complicated question of online communities: 1. how to motivate users to generate content and 2. what is the remuneration of users generating content.
In our case, Users generating content will be hairdressers. Their remuneration: free marketing for their business.
We will see if this logic will function. I strongly believe that yes.
