Very interesting questions come up when we talk to Marketing organizations about putting together user and customer communities. In full 60%+ of the organizations we talk with the “community” is usually started either by Support team or the Developer team – since they are in the high tech vertical and the value proposition is to reduce costs from supporting and managing a growing customer base.

In the last few quarters Marketing teams have increasingly started to look at their communities and trying to learn and figure out how to message, share and position their company, new products and news with their “communities”.

It becomes obvious very quickly for “traditional” marketing executives and professionals that the community “does have a mind of its own”, its own culture and its own perception of news, quality and brand.

So the dominating question for marketing organizations with communities becomes – “HOW can I control the brand, message and perception of my company & our products with the community?”

Francois at the Emergence Marketing blog has written very eloquently about this topic with his case study of BMC. Of course, Alan Moore has a very strong opinion on this too.

Fundamentally if you are a marketing professional, here are items to consider and answer for your self and some solutions for engaging thriving communities.

1. Engagement vs. Moderation: Is your brand passive (staid, corporate, serious – which is the norm for many industries) or is it more active (fun, easy)? An example would be New York life (serious brand) vs. Aflac (fun brand). Based on the demographic, although they are in the same industry, their customers and users are different and the perceptions are different. In our experiences for both passive and active brands, community moderation is nice, but community engagement is more critical.

E.g: In a recent community board, a customer shared some information about a product that failed during their tests of daylight savings time and actually made fun of it. The reaction from the company was to remove that posting.

Our suggestion was to instead admit the mistake, make fun of it in a nice way (as people now call it the John Stewart-ization of mistakes) and provide the fix for the problem.

2. Control vs. Facilitation: Marketing professionals have to realize that they cannot control 100% of the message and brand perception any more. Rather than control we recommend you facilitate customers by incentives (not monetary) to align to the perception you wish to see in the community and reflective of your corporate goal.

E.g: At a large developer community, the new product (still to be launched) had a lot of buzz among developers, but there were several customers already comparing it to other existing products and calling it a me-too product. The company response was to state via a “moderator” that since the product was not yet released, any discussion or speculation was useless and hence not worth discussing.

Our recommended approach was to have the product manager have a private webinar with some of the key community members to provide an “early preview” and collect competitive intelligence and have the members of the community start to discuss the known aspects of the product with the forum.

3. Co-opting vs. Competing: Customers have often come up with the best positioning for some of the products in companies that I have worked at. Almost always they express it in simple, elegant terms compared to a marketing person who desires to get the most “spin”. This is not to say marketing professionals are always “spinning” or that there is not value in it. Some marketing people I have worked with almost always will not accept the “layman’s description” of the product, since they believe they have to sell the bigger vision and value so they can charge a premium – this sometimes puts them in odds with the customer’s true usage or unintended uses of the product, which creates a competitive dynamic. Why not co-opt instead the unintended use and market to it so you can get best value?

E.g: At a community forum, a certain member asked other participants for some experiences associated with a tangential use of a embedded software product for one of their other business units. The immediate next step was a call from the inside sales person that the customer was NOT licensed to use the product for that business unit.

Our suggestion was to instead engage the customer in trying to understand what they wanted to use it for and how could the company help, then figure out how to possibly up sell their products to the new business unit.