- Topic: Building online brand comunities

- Presenter: Lee Dale from Smack (smackinc.com)

Lee was talking about creating community websites centered on brands. By this he mainly meant brand-centric forums. Even the most boring brand - ex: bottled water - can have a community built around it because it is a community of people who share the lifestyle advocated by the brand, not just the brand itself. So a Gatorade community would be about sports, a Firestone community would be about cars etc. etc.

Example of a brand community: Jones Soda (http://www.jonessoda.com/files/community.php)

They are effective because they engage in genuine dialogue with their customers. They ask them to vote on the flavours they love, or for the ones that absolutely suck. They produce turkey flavoured soda for thanksgiving and ask users to post movies of themselves drinking it - with vomitrocious results. They also run competitions where they ask users to upload photos, vote on the best ones and they then use the photos as labels for the next production run of soda bottles...

Building a brand community is a long process - 6 months to a year to get it going. This doesn't sit well with traditional marketers who are used to a "campaign" model of marketing, where you put in a lot of energy and then drop everything.

Finally, Lee mentioned that there are 3 main types of facilitators in communities, connectors, mavens, and salesmen. Connectors are people who have lots of friends and advertise the brand community to them. Mavens are people who have experience and they mentor/answer the questions of new users. Salesmen are people who set trends - their friends buy specific products because they see them using them.

Lee's major point: through tracking forum statistics, the community managers are able to determine which people belong to these leadership groups. For example: if someone has many posts, or answers many IMs then it is logical that they are a pillar of the community. The manager then can target these people with special offers and work closely with them to accelerate the growth of the community.

PDF here on Community Building and Jones Soda: http://www.smackinc.com/media/pdf/brand_communities_jones_soda.pdf