by: Matt Rhodes
So here’s another post on the Deloitte / Beeline Labs Tribalisation of Business Study that everybody seems to be talking about (including me here and here). They are running a webinar next week on the study and I came across some slides they will be talking about thanks to Awareness Networks.
Here are a couple of slides that start to show the benefits identified of online communities. The first shows what companies are doing with online communities and the second shows the benefits they are getting.
It is clear from this that amplifying word of mouth, innovation and online research communities that are the most frequent use of online communities in the study. This mirrors our experience of working with clients and talking to people in this space. All three of these can be uses of the online community and this medium of engaging people is great for achieving them.
Perhaps of more interest for me is the second slide that looks at the benefits people are seeing of online communities. Greater awareness (including through better organic SEO) is something that is a clear benefit for brands of a community, as is generation of new ideas. What is interesting is that almost 25% of firms reported that the online community led to each of: increased sales, more referrals and more leads. This shows the clear and immediate business benefit of the communities and so the more immediate (as well as the longer term) benefits they bring.
These slides are great and start to show some of the real benefits of online communities that the study found. Adding depth and detail to the reports that came out when this study was first released.
Usage of online communities
Business measures of success
Some more reading
Original Post: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2008/08/some-evidence-of-online-community-benefits/
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Alain Hemelinckx says:
04 Aug 2008, 17:56
hey Matt,
quoting "Greater awareness (including through better organic SEO) is something that is a clear benefit for brands of a community"
I'm not sure at all about this statement. check my post ( in french, sorry )http://emarketing.typepad.com/emarketing/2008/07/tude-conversati.html and the research I'm referring to..
In the pre study, when googling a brand, it appears that social media stands only for 0.27% of the 100 first links/results.
So social media may be more selective (ambassador profiles on it) but in numbers, 0.27% is really, really low.
kind regards
Alain
Matt Rhodes says:
05 Aug 2008, 11:39
Hi Alain,
Thanks for the comment and for the link - and no worries about only being in French...good to put my university study to good use sometimes :-)
The research is interesting and I'm looking forward to reading it in more detail. What we see at FreshNetworks is that online communities can be very good for helping organic SEO around key words, rather than necessarily the brand name.
Community members generate a lot of content using the natural key words they will also use when they are searching. We have a client at the moment who wants to promote a debate on beauty and one of the benefits that we are starting to see is that the community is being picked up by search engines when you search for terms related to beauty. It is still small at the moment but over the next couple of months I'd expect this to increase.
So from our experience, communities are great for keyword-based organic SEO. Which, after all, is the thing many firms are looking for with their marketing.
Would be interested to hear any other thoughts you have on this - either here or contact me through our main blog:
http://blog.freshnetworks.com
Matt
FreshNetworks
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