The importance of affiliating with others in corporate community efforts.
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Over on the Marketing 2.0 blog, I wrote about the importance of thinking big about your corporate community efforts if you want to have a real impact on your business and if you want to make it onto the CMO’s agenda. I would love your feedback.
Thinking about the issues of scale that large companies need to be able to achieve in order to make a difference also made me think about the importance to affiliate with others in order to provide a valuable service to a community. If a company needs hundreds of thousands or millions of small business community members to make a difference, they will never succeed if 10 other companies are vying for those same members by creating their own separate communities. If, however, they could find a set of partners who deliver complementary products and services, then together they could attract a critical mass of members and achieve their goals…
More on this thought later - I would also appreciate your feedback.
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July 22nd, 2008 at 1:11 pm
[...] The Importance of Affiliating with Others in Corporate Community Efforts [...]
August 10th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Hi Francois,
You make a great point here.
There is another angle to this as well, and that is authenticity of content. Using the Bank of America example you have used with the Small Business Community example, why would any Small Business Owner -
1. Think of BofA when trying to figure out larger and process related business issues.
2. Accept BofA giving them advice about things not related to banking.
Partnering with someone like ‘CNet’ for example or Bain Consulting (using the Wiki example from Groundswell), any advice or business recommendations published on this community suddenly have a lot more value.
I am working on a Small Business Community site for a large technology manufacturer and this is exactly our issue right now. Why would a user take business advice from a technology manufacturer.
We are thinking of partnering with content producers that are known in their respective fields and also with large content publishing networks to create a community that offers real business advice.
Did you make any more progress on this thought? Did you publish anything else on this? I would love to see what you and others have to say.
Thanks
Sav