We all want to build brand communities. Instinctively we know they are a good thing. But increasingly, ‘community’ (much like ‘user generated content’ or ‘virals’) is becoming just another weapon in the marketing armoury: often it's a case of 'we’re going to build a brand community' much as it would once have been 'we're going to make a 30” TV commercial'.
But community doesn’t work like this (in the same way that something won’t go viral just because you call it a viral). Community is organic, uncontrollable; it forms itself, and plays by it’s own rules. You can’t make a brand community form, just because you want one. You have to be a brand that’s worthy of a community forming around it.
Obviously, you can put the tools in place that help facilitate this. But you can't prescribe the form the community will take, how it will behave, even what it will say about you (much as you might like to be able to). You just have to let go and let it happen. And not worry about the consequences. If people say something ‘negative’ or are just ‘off brand’ the instinct is to clamp down and get all controlling. But this is the worse thing you can do, if true community is what you're after.
Learn from what people are saying and build on it: your brand isn’t set in stone for eternity (and if it is, it’s probably dead already); it is an on-going story, and like any good story it can have its twists, turns and plot developments (as long as they’re logical progressions).
Anyway, Modern Marketing has a really good post that looks at the nature of community and what it means for brands. Well worth a read. And it makes use of a good football example. Joga, Nike’s football ‘community’ site, looks great from the outside (and has some good content). But it was ultimately about trying to form community in Nike’s own (controlled) image. As such, after the world cup hype died down, and the big TV budgets wained, so did interest in the Joga community, despite all the glitz and glamour. In comparison, the post looks at Arseblog, one Arsenal fan's blog. This is a real and thriving 'amateur' community, now of a similar size to Joga.
This really does show that the best communities really do just happens because people want it to. And it's folksy, grassroots-ness that normally thrives (like community any where, real or virtual). The lesson for marketing? In the immortal words of Leon Hayward: don’t push it, don’t force it baby, let it happen naturally.
