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

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!