Last week, my colleague, Bill Fanning, and I put together a post that talked about the fact that not many people would want to join a community that focused on toothpaste. Our point was that in most cases, many people are much more passionate about lifestyle topics like fishing, fitness or cooking vs. an individual product (iPhones and Chia Pets excluded). At the end of the post, Bill and I issued a challenge:
Rather than ask you the traditional, “what do yout think?” question, I’m going to issue you a challenge instead. In the comments, feel free to offer up any product, service or brand and I’ll brainstorm with the Powered team to come up with a relevant online community.
To be fair, the comments were much more engaging than the actual post (one advantage of getting a bunch of verbose bloggers to come and write mini-posts in your comments section). In particular, Tim, Scott and Doug offered insights on how one might go about building a toothpaste community. Others were more than happy to issue challenges (listed below).
As a refresher, here is the list of the challenge items/topics that came up:
- Ball bearings (thanks to Peter Kim)
- Razor blades, Drano, enterprise IT desktop configuration or anti-virus management tools (thanks to Warren Sukernek)
- Textbook publishers, soy-based candles, fur coats, or water pistols (thanks to Ari Herzog)
- Mail sorting machines and/or postage meters and men’s underwear (thanks to Jay Gaines)
- Farm equipment (thanks to Paul May)
- Office cleaning services (thanks to Mike Langford)
- Life insurance (thanks to Jim Storer)
- Dogfood (thanks to KyNam Doan)
- Niche electronic components geared toward engineers and purchasers for contract manufacturers and OEMs (thanks to Jesse Luna)
- Medical devices (thanks to Adam Cohen and Howard Greenstein who weren’t exactly able to agree on target audience)
At the risk of looking like Bill and I are copping out, we attempted to boil the items above into buckets and then pick one to illustrate our point. At some point in time, I will try and expand on this and can flesh out other community ideas but in order to get this out in a semi-timely fashion, this is our approach.
Basically, the challenges fell into three categories:
- Products – ball bearings, drano, razor blades, software, men’s underwear, candles, fur coats, water pistols, electronics components
- Services – textbook publishing, office cleaning, insurance ["insurance" added at 5:35 thanks to sister, Heather's comment]
- Equipment – farm equipment, postage meters/sorting equipment
PRODUCTS
For the first bunch, the answer is actually pretty easy. As we discussed in the original post (and in the comments), one only needs to ask either “who uses the product?” or “where does the product fit into someone’s lifestyle?” In the case of ball bearings, I would not recommend that someone build a ball bearing community and neither would Peter Kim.
To that end, after Peter issued his challenged, he offered me a hint at where he might start in thinking about a community that included ball bearings in the mix by DM-ing me a link to the Shaeffler Group’s INA site — a site geared toward “precision equipment for the automotive industry” which includes ball bearings. Voila, if we want to build a ball bearing community, we could target folks that manufacture precision parts for industrial equipment makers OR for the auto industry. The focus could be on things like standard setting, new technologies, recommended suppliers, etc. Boring stuff for you and me but a core part of the job for anyone in that industry.
The same could be done with razor blades (part of a painter’s community), drano (a discussion topic for a green cleaning products community) or even soy wax candles (believe it or not, there are thousands of people that actually manufacture these things – I know because my friend Laura Mitrovich does this). A couple of important things to note here: one, the long tail makes it easier than ever to bring niche audiences together thanks to Web 2.0 technologies and two, communities don’t require millions or even thousands of members to thrive.
SERVICES
Services are actually easier in many ways than products because all you have to do is look at the people participating in the “service” being rendered to find a target for your community. In the case of an office cleaning services community, this could be targeted at the people that clean offices, or their managers, with a goal of exchanging best practices around green cleaning products, sources for new talent, ways to cut costs or even ways to combat sleep deprivation (some of the office cleaners I’ve met work 2-3 jobs and as a result don’t have much time for sleep).
If we take this same approach to a service like “book publishing” (vs. the actual end product which are the books themselves), you could provide the online equivalent of O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change Conference to publishers. Just take a look at the agenda for ideas on what the topics of conversation might look like.
EQUIPMENT
Also not that difficult, mainly because at my old company, Mzinga, we ran a private community for John Deere tractor dealers and high-end users. The community was a heavily focused on research and helped John Deere answer questions like, what did high-end owners want? what did owners dislike? and how could John Deere work better to co-create with these key constituents.
Now friends, Adam Cohen and Howard Greenstein threw a little bit of a tougher challenge out there in the form of medical devices. And as you can see in their point/counterpoint/point/counterpoint conversation in the comments, not everyone agrees on who the target audience should be for this type of community.
Interestingly, these communities do already exist and some are directed toward the doctor/hospital crowd like the one that Picis runs. Others do involve patients but work to ratchet the discussion up around the disease (prevention AND/OR support). Boston Scientific has started down this path with their Stent.com site but have yet to add the community features.
So there you have it. Not as meaty as you had hoped? Well, we’ll just have to do a virtual roundtable on the topic. If you’re interested, let me know in the comments or DM me on Twitter.
Filed under: Community, Social Marketing, Social Media
Intriguing results, guys. If those weren’t a challenge, then what is? If it’s fairly easy to determine analogies for products, services, and equipment, what other groups exist but are not referenced above?
Virtual round table on this engaging puzzle? Totally IN.
I love a challenge. (Nice starting points for each broad idea, by the way)
Thanks for the original and follow up posts. I note you glossed right over Jim’ Storer’s Life Insurance challenge
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I think the toughest part is creating a community that satisfies both the desires of the business and the member interests. A company is rarely creating communities so they can be benevolent. Rather, they’re hoping for brand awareness, loyalty, market research, etc. The real challenge comes building a community or social network that matches the business needs with the member interests, no matter the product, service or equipment.
Sometimes, as you point out, it may not be the right time to launch a community for a particular audience, say for cleaning service folks (Mike Langford’s challenge). They’re too busy and may not have consistent access to a computer. That doesn’t mean there’s no audience. Businesses just need to know who their community audience is, what members are going to want to interact about, and how the businesses can derive value to benefit all parties.
Thanks for the thought-provoking posts. The comments definitely add perspective and color.
I like the way you guys picked up the ball and ran with it, since we were trying hard to play stump the band. Each one of the topics/lifestyle interests that you described would be very compelling to its target audience. Nice work!
Thanks for the follow up post. I’m thrilled that my comment on the original resulted in pictures of men’s underwear in this post. I knew you could meet the challenge – if you can build a successful community around Phase I site assessments, you can probably do it around anything.
Great follow up post, Aaron. Thanks for including my real life example in the post.
I have to say, this is very funny. The niche electronics community would overlap with the ball bearing people!
In fact, we have a new blog focused on measurement and control products and the last title was “Auto Industry Woes Open Opportunities for Position Sensing Industry?” Had to mention that, too coincidental.
You took on some big challenges here. First of all, these are primarily *offline* companies/brands. Second, in the case of the ball bearing company, you took on a B2B company. It’s safe to say that these types of companies will be the last companies to form online communities. But to the innovators and early adopters, the spoils will go!
This project is getting funnier by the minute. I love that a casual “You can’t use social for that” conversation has spawned such a multi-dimensional dialogue.
As fascinating as I am about this round of findings, I can’t wait to see what comes next. I think THIS is the big “So what?” our industry has to answer. Remember, there was a time when people said “The telephone is nice, but won’t work for MY business.” Same of email and the internet.
[...] like Jessica Smith (she’s on Twitter, too) and their devoted audiences. Whether you sell ball bearings, men’s underwear or Drano, your customers get together and hang out. Are you hanging out with them? [...]
@ariherzog I’m sure I missed a few categories/miscategorized what I’ve got. For the sake of this post, those three buckets seemed to make the most sense.
@leslie you’re on – I’ll keep you posted
@hjstrout your comment wins for most insightful. As a community manager, I take your thoughts/recommendations very seriously.
@warrenss @jaygaines @scotthepburn – you guys really helped make this post (and the original, “Toothpaste Community” what it is. Thanks!
@jesseluna great minds think alike. Keep us posted on your project!
Aaron,
It all centers around building a mousetrap that is attractive for the mouse. If a community doesn’t continue to stimulate and attract back members (or interest them to begin with), it will fail. Companies need to determine three things (sorry, I couldn’t resist)
1) What are the business benefits or problems we are looking to impact with a social network?
2) Who is my audience and why will they be interested in joining and what will keep them coming back?
3) Providing them the cheese or the content/activity that will make your community a benefit to their personal or professional life on an on-going basis.
Great post and out of the box thinking as usual!
@pauline as another smart “community gal,” I appreciate your great advice. Thanks for adding your “three things” (having major flashbacks to days with B. Libert right now!)
My favorite comment is how to make a community worth the cost to host / promote / maintain it for the sponsoring company. For example, we can have a farming equipment community (http://www.greencollectors.com/ or http://www.antiquetractors.com/), but will it actually profit the farming equipment manufacturer? If there’s a dog community, will participants buy more dog food (http://petcharts.purina.com/)? I’ve heard Nascar is notorious for fans actually purchasing the products of their favorite drivers (http://tinyurl.com/7pfk8l) – how did they do it? Will social communities share the same fan to purchase loyalty?
So – no thoughts on how to help Restaurants To You?
[...] to engage at a deeper level within a branded community. Aaron suggested a nice approach where you categorize your offering and look to commonly effective strategies. I’ll add to that by suggesting an additional approach that is a little more [...]
[...] to engage at a deeper level within a branded community. Aaron suggested a nice approach where you categorize your offering and look to commonly effective strategies. I’ll add to that by suggesting an additional approach that is a little more [...]
[...] popular “Would you Join a Toothpaste Community?” post, along with follow-up posts where Aaron tackled a few challenging products from a community-building perspective. I also sounded off on how the brand is your bridge to community [...]
[...] popular “Would you Join a Toothpaste Community?” post, along with follow-up posts where Aaron tackled a few challenging products from a community-building perspective. I also sounded off on how the brand is your bridge to community [...]