• Allstate’s Good Hands Community
• MyColts.net – official community for the Indianapolis Colts
• AARP online community
• Ovation Arts Community

I assume the companies that run these communities and others are using them to engage their audience and bring people together for:

• Retention – Keep current customers around longer (and see how this community contributes to their spending)
• Acquisition – Identify new prospects and generate leads
• Research and data collection – monitor what people are talking about and collecting more data on prospects/customers
• New revenue opportunities – selling products, creating new products, incorporating sponsors, advertising, etc.
• Cost reduction – maybe these communities help companies save money on customer service
• Branding/awareness

In order for this to work, two crucial things must happen – people have to join the community and they have to participate (or at least come back and visit again). Sure there’s a lot that goes into this but in order for a community to be successful, people must join and participate.

Other communities may function fine with a set number of people or may work as private communities, but I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about communities where it’s important that the number of members/participants is constantly growing. Since a percentage of people usually stop participating at some point, or they only participate once, or they never participate, these communities must always be adding more members.

Here’s how things usually work with these communities when new people navigate to them.

1) People can see all (or some) of the great content there- activity streams, pictures, videos, question and answer sections, blogs, discussion forums, groups, etc– without being a member or logging in.

2) In order to participate in discussions, people must join the community by filling out a few fields (name, email address, password, and maybe others) or by clicking a button that enables them to use their Facebook identity or other social profile to register/log in.

What I’d really like to know is how many people would have participated in some manner (ex: commenting on a discussion), but don’t because they aren’t sure they want to become a full member..yet or ever.

What if we made it easier for people to participate in these online communities? What if we made parts of them more like blogs, where it’s accepted that people must put in a name and email address to participate, yet don’t feel pressured into having to become a “member.” You could then prompt people to register after the comment is published–you would already have their name and email address and would only have to go one extra step to ask for a password.

How many more participants and members could these communities gain if they opened them up a little bit and didn’t force membership in order to participate? And how many more people would join as a result of these non-members, if they’re given the choice to syndicate their comments/participation to sites like Facebook and Twitter so their friends are exposed to the communities? It would be fun to test.

On one hand, you want committed members and asking them to register is a commitment. But on the other hand, by forcing membership, you’re losing people who would have casually participated and then went on to become full members later.

In many cases, just being able to participate isn’t enough of a reason for people to join. People can often find the same/similar content on other blogs, forums and social networks they’re already participating in or don’t have to join. Maybe this means the community’s content isn’t good enough..or maybe not..there’s good content everywhere these days. You often have to add in special deals, offers, games, access, etc to attract people. So maybe we should let more people participate casually in online communities and then reward actual members with the more special stuff. I’m not sure what the answer is but I think there’s something here.

What do you think?

*photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/27518426@N03/3874225648/

• Market research
• Product development
• Customer service
• Sales and marketing
• Employee hiring

A few businesses and teams get this, but overall we’re still not there yet. Many teams are getting involved, but not always with a purpose or clear strategy. A Facebook page that has 100k people on it is worthless, without the proper strategy behind it. If you’re a team, you don’t really want Facebook fans, you want ticket buyers.

The video below describes some ideas for ways that teams can use social media the right way and what benefits they (and their fans) can get from this.

The last idea in the video is one I look forward to exploring more, and would love your thoughts on. It’s one thing to do some basic videos occasionally and make them exclusive to Twitter or YouTube to drive awareness and engagement. But hardcore fans are always willing to consume more, in my opinion. Why aren’t teams capitalizing on this?

More and more fans now want to participate, be involved in the creation of ticket packages, get exclusive, behind-the-scenes videos, articles and real-time updates, get personalized merchandise, vote on ideas for sponsor promotions, etc.  Clearly people want content in new forms as indicated by the explosion of sites like Twitter. Why aren’t more teams taking some of these concepts, creating new content areas and fan clubs and charging fans for access to drive revenue?

If you’re a die-hard Lakers fan, wouldn’t you pay for the right to see Kobe’s real-time updates right after the game, before the press get a crack at him? Wouldn’t you pay to have access to short, 30 second videos from Phil Jackson before and after practice? Wouldn’t you pay for a chance to ask a member of the Lakers staff or ownership any question you wanted once a month? I know I would.

I think teams may need to rethink a lot of the things they’re doing online. There should be a balance between using these free social media tools to expand an audience and keep a pulse on what fans want/think vs. charging people for access to really cool content and opportunities. Some of the things teams and players are doing on outside sites could be moved in-house (and on team communities, so they have a better value proposition) so they can be better monetized and packaged for hardcore fans. I think this is the only way teams will see a good ROI from their efforts and will be able to justify spending money on new opportunities that serve to engage fans in more ways.

I’m always interested in hearing what you think. Thanks for watching/reading and I look forward to your thoughts on this.

Here’s an interesting picture taken from Compete.com:

According to Compete.com (probably not 100% accurate, but usually pretty close), both sites attracted roughly the same amount of unique visitors last month as they did in July of 2008. Here are the numbers:

• Planet Orange – 1,767 unique visitors in July (1,413 uniques in July 2008)
• MyColts.net – 8,290 unique visitors in July (8,137 uniques in July 2008)

Unique visitors is only one indicator of growth, and I didn’t look at other important metrics such as number of active members, time spent on site, revenue generated from community members, etc. But according to Compete.com, the communities haven’t grown much in terms of unique visitors over the past year. Why haven’t these sites grown more?

I can’t say for sure, but my guess is that it’s a combination of things:

• Lack of promotion
• Lack of integration with existing marketing efforts
• No clear value proposition stated on the home page
• Not enough unique/exclusive content and access
• More focus on fans on existing social media sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc)

But those are just a few guesses. I really have no idea why these two communities appear to have stagnated in growth. I wonder if other team communities have also stagnated. What do you think?

Are official online team communities a good idea? I still say yes (when executed properly), but would love to hear your thoughts.