Zhiwei's Academic Journel

Marketing & Online Communities: Current Practice Research / July 2007
Published by Forum One Communications
http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/archives/335-Marketing-Online-Communities-Research-Report-Released.html

This report presents results from a study that investigates the current state of marketing to onlien communities, from the perspective of both the online community host, as well as from the perspective of a marketer.

The major methods they used is the survey and selected in-person interviews. The questions include background information, such as name, organization, email address, size of the community, goal of online community efforts, major online community activities, types and
amount of marketing and advertising activity on online community, availability of various advertising targeting, effectiveness of marketing activities, policies and requirements for marketing and advertising.

Overall, it seems that banner and text ads were the most common forms of marketing activity, followed by RSS, branded content and surveys. Majority of respondent's sites have run of site and contextual targeting available. Less of sophisticated technologies (behavioral and demographic targeting) were available. Among those marketing activities, text advertising was considered as the most effective form of advertising in terms of cost efficiency. Some of the common themes as best practice for advertising and marketing policies on communities
include that advertising must be clearly delineated from community features and content, be relevant to community members interests and needs, be appropriate to community brand, follow content and creative guidelines, and cannot be from competitors to host organization.

Most online community hots are also negotiating relationship with third-party markets. There are somen challenges in working with third-party marketers, such as third-party markets want to control content/context in which their ad will be shown, difficulty in matching ads with content, overhead associated with helping markets understand community culture, the lack of a pre-screened thrid party ad network, lack of affinity of markets with community/company brand, difficulty in determing fair rate and cost basis, and adertiser eager to push invasive or unusual advertising to get results.

From the survey, most of community hosts plan on working to increase revenue for marketing and advertising activities. It seems that when incorporating marketing and advertising into their community, the community hosts should be very cautious and attentive to your member reactions, and open to their feedback, should understand the audiences needs and sensitivivities to advertising messages, should establish a good relationship with the agency account manager, should establish creative and messaging guidelines for marketing to ensure appropriateness, and make sure ads are appropriate and add value to community.

Obvious, online community is very attracted to marketers, comparing with traditional media. It is mainly because communities provide energy and passion if they believe in the product or message. Communities also spread messages virtually, enhance the credibility of a message, and provide build in context. Comparatively, traditional media consumption is in decline, and community participation and social media consumption is on the rise. It is often expected that
community can foster relationship between companies and consumers.

When marketing on online community, it is obvious more difficult to measure success because of lacking quantifiable success metrics. Often times, marketing performance is qualified in terms of increasing "touches", increasing reach and increasing access. Lack of understanding of best practice and how to measure the marketing results also seems to be one of the biggest challenge in creating campaigns or engaging online community members in market activities.

When it comes to choosing which community-based technology for marketing, there are quite few choices. The msot common technologies include branded channels/content sections, text ads, storefront in virtual world, campaign-specific postcasts or blogs, etc. Among thoese, adwords by Google is mentioned as an effective technique, followed by niche community centers, and relationship building.

If considering incorporating online community into a marketing effort, the marketer should take the following into consideration: provide geneuine value to the community in a non-disruptive way, build relationships in the community first, need to participant instead of "talk at", behold good personal knowledge or passion of the subject matter, be authentic and sincere in communcations, be willing to engage for the "long haul", and use community in the marketing mix not as a sole venue.