B2B and B2C communities – no difference, it’s all about h2h
I get that question so often that I thought I would write a short post about it. What is the difference between a B2B and a B2C community? Or people will ask me, can you please only show me B2B examples because we are different than B2C.
When it comes to communities – especially successful ones – there is no difference between the two. The main interactions in communities do not happen between businesses and other businesses, or between businesses and consumers – they happen between humans and other humans. And that is no different in B2B than in B2C environments.
Sure, some people will show a greater affinity for a consumer product than they will for a piece of enterprise software, but successful communities are never built around products, they are built around the members and their shared emotions. Even the Harley community is not built around bikes, it’s built around a shared lifestyle of the community members. And so the dynamics within that community will in fact not be all that different from the dynamics you would find in a software developer community – it comes down to human to human interactions or h2h.
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September 24th, 2009 at 9:08 am
it’s really true all about the human element and building relationships based on that premise.
March 11th, 2010 at 10:09 am
B2C can be more personally, B2B has less human element because it`s more of employers, not warm human relationships -)
Cheers
IT outsourcing
May 25th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Very true – it is all about the human element and building relationships based on that premise.
This comment was originally posted on The Women Entrepreneurs Blog @ Simon