Business terms come and go. In the 1990s, you couldn’t walk through an office building without hearing “paradigm” mentioned. In the early 2000s, it was all about “connectivity.” Now, we have moved on and have a new term, which is equally misused and misinterpreted: community.

It is not difficult to see how community became the latest buzzword for online businesses. Over the last decade, the internet has moved from being a relatively closed system to a network that is remarkably open. While the 1990s had Geocities and personal web hosting, the late 2000s are dominated by completely free, entirely open networking services, designed to allow anyone, anywhere, to connected with anyone else. If the early web was based on isolation, the new internet is most certainly based on community.

The problem comes when businesses take community for granted. Everywhere you look, there are businesses trying to become involved in social media that simply do not belong. Trade plumbing, retail, and industrial design businesses are scrambling to build a community around their work. The problem is not that people do not enjoy and value the business, but that there simply isn’t a need, or reason to build a community for it. The technology is there, but without the right execution, business communities are simply empty shells with relatively little growth potential.

The real payoff comes with selective community building. The technology boom of the late 1990s pushed thousands of ill-suited companies to invest in web presences, online interfaces, and new business models. While thousands succeeded, most did not. Their businesses simply did not benefit from the new developments, their cash flow did not expand when they moved online, and their offline power simply did not translate.

What is undoubtedly going to happen in social media is much the same. As social media grows to become more and more mainstream, businesses that simply are not suited to online communities will attempt to build their own. Unfortunately, most will fail. For every business that deserves and manages an online community, there will be hundreds that rush towards the latest marketing move without incorporating it into any long-term strategy.

If you run a small business, be it offline or online, and want to incorporate community marketing into your marketing strategy, take a step back and look at its value. For some businesses, particularly those that attract a certain type of customer, community marketing – particularly through social media –can be a remarkably powerful marketing method. For others, the expense simply does not bring in any real return, as a community simply can’t be created around each and every business out there.

Social media is a powerful tool for marketers, but it is not a fix-all solution. An online community can’t pop up out of nowhere overnight, and it certainly can’t fix a broken business model. While thousands of businesses will no doubt see the success that others are having with social media marketing and imitate without thought, most will fail. The successes will be those that apply social media tactics to their marketing strategy, look for unique ways to differentiate themselves, and treat community as a long-term earned goal, not a short-term solution.

Andrea Kalli
Certified Internet and Social Marketing VA

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Tags and Categories: building communities, business internet marketing, internet marketing, Online Business, Promotion and Marketing, social marketing assistant, Social Media Marketing

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