What Drives B2B Community Participation

January 14th 2009 Posted to Marketing, Social networking

If you have followed the social computing space at all in the last 2 years you have undoubtedly come across the Social Technographics work of my colleague Josh Bernoff, and former colleague Charlene Li. The Social Technographics Ladder is tremendously useful to anyone thinking about community dynamics and accordingly has been wildly successful. Needless to say my colleagues Peter Burris, Laura Ramos, and I got a little jealous.

So, late last year we launched a survey of our own that dives into the very deep end of business communities. We’re very excited to write up the findings and apply them to real communities over the coming year, and I will be sharing some of the early analysis with you here.

One of the first questions we wanted to tackle in the course of the research is what drives community participation (see graphic).

b2b_community_drivers1

Quick reactions:

1. The quality of the people in the community is critically important. Its not enough to equip marketers or community managers with the right content and let them loose. Instead you must get the actual experts to participate and provide value. Their presence alone will have impact.

2. Volume of activity is not critical. Many marketers hold off with communities for fear of signing themselves up for a major commitment to content creation. Instead this survey suggests that volume is not nearly as important as quality. Excellent content infrequently may be enough.

3. Diversity is not a value in and of itself. Community members (from the sponsor side or the customer side) are not valued because they provide variety alone; the contribution itself must be up to snuff.

4. It is difficult, but not impossible, to get new communities off the ground. There is a self-reinforcing nature to communities: People join because there are quality community members. Getting off the ground with a set of community members that will attract others can be tough. However it is not the case where once a community reaches scale it can’t be displaced. Size of the community is not a virtue itself.

So, you play the analyst: what else do you see here that I’m missing? Does this data reflect your experiences either as a marketer or a community member?

View Comments

  • Thanks for the teaser even though it's not very surprising, Oliver. :-) Unlike consumer-to-consumer communities where lots of people are trading TV time for Web time, members of biz communities are trading their work time. Hence, they're most interested in connecting with relevant people and useful content. Biz communities usually fail because companies aren't willing to invest heavily in them .. yet. I ran the SharePoint community for 3+ yrs, and I was constantly underbudgeted .. until I was able to show stats and metrics as described in my blog entry at http://communityzenmaster.com/blogs/lliu/archive/2008/11/14/how-to-attain-self-sustainability-in-community-forums.aspx.

    However, companies cannot afford to keep investing in communities forever. Other tactics are needed to achieve a reasonable level of self-sustainability. I'll write more about this on my blog at a later time, but my Twsummary is (given the http://90-9-1.com principle): "need analytics/metrics to identify&nurture Top 1%, engage&grow Next 9%, connect&incite Rest 90%" :-)

    I look forward to seeing more of your research, so we can compare it with our own findings, which Marc will periodically blog about at http://www.connectedaction.com.


    Lawrence Liu
    Director of Platform Strategy
    Telligent
  • Thanks for posting this survey Oliver, with its very interesting responses. Great to see another source among your colleagues at Forrester with some delicious research to chew on!

    But my first reaction to this analysis is that if expert voices and quality content were all that were required for community, we would just set up a few expert blogs and avoid peer communities altogether. However, even the most active of expert blogs pales in comparison to the amount of traffic at a large peer-to-peer community. So what gives?

    I wonder if this is another example of the difference between what people say and what they actually do.

    In our experience, most people participate in communities for 6 reasons:

    To ask questions of a broader audience
    To find out what my peers are doing
    To obtain validation from other members
    To provide feedback and suggestions to improve my situation
    To share knowledge and be recognized by my peers
    To be heard

    Quality content addresses only one of those areas. People are what is important in communities, not content, and activity is the key evidence that there are people there to engage.

    I don't mean to imply that experts are not important, or that peer communities are better than expert blogs. But I do think it is dangerous to emphasize the quality of content over the activity of the members when it comes to communities. In my experience, there is no substitute for numbers in a community and numbers are more likely to bring in quality people who create quality content - not the other way around. The good news is that these experts are usually willing to participate in your community for free, provided there are enough people there to hear them. Its only when you don't have enough activity in the community that an organization may be required to spend additional resources on content generation.

    But definitely a good question asked and I can't wait to see more on this topic as relates to business communities!
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