Thoughts On Building Branded Communities
- June 11th, 2007
- 1 Comments
When most of us on the content side think about building online communities, the conventional wisdom is that you’re in it for the long haul. You have to seed your community, nurture outspoken leaders/participants and be ok with slow and steady growth if or until you hit that elusive tipping point. I question whether brands trying to capitalize on the popularity of social networking sites by building their own branded communities are really pursuing a successful strategy. We all know what happened with Wal-Mart, and that Bud.tv is struggling. The big news last week was that Sprite is launching a mobile community called “The Yard.” Coke tried building its own virtual world before (it’s inside MyCoke, under cokestudios in the nav). According to the website Mad.co.uk:
Coca-Cola already has its own virtual world, Coke Studios, which has attracted 8 million registered users since its 2002 launch. The drinks brand denies the move into Second Life is an admission of Coke Studios’ failure, saying instead that it is “fishing where the fish are”.
Is 8 million registered users in five years considered a success? Maybe it is for a brand. We know the most popular virtual worlds are reporting millions of registered regular users each month (for example, Habbo reports over 7 million a month). We don’t know how many of Coke’s 8 million users ever returned.
I just continue to wonder whether it makes sense for brands to build their own online communities? I get building some sort of brand engagement experience, ideally where the user gets something cool out of it. Maybe it’s a game that’s actually fun to play, or free music downloads, etc. MyCoke Rewards seems to be working. But requiring users to set up yet another profile and expecting them to spend lots of time in your branded community and invite their friends seems like a stretch.
What do you think? Will The Yard be successful for Sprite? Can a brand foster a long term community? Are they equipped to innovate and add features that make first time users come back and invite their friends? And if not, should they be building communities they know are short term and will peter out eventually?
Although there seem to be many hiccups in building branded communities, I still think it will work. What would be the deciding factor for success really depends on how much brands are willing to sit back and let users lead the way. We all know sometimes the wisdom of the crowd supersede management. Branded communities can be successful if the ‘netizens’ are democratized and that hardly comes by knowing that at the end of the day, it is ‘controlled’ by a single brand. So when the crowd decides something else is trendy which appears to be somewhat irrelevant to the brand, both brand and crowd will then reach the crossroad. And they have to decide whether to stick together or go separate ways.