Online Communities and Their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril (PDF; 715 KB)

Working with online communities has long been touted as a great way for a company to save money in its marketing, support, sales, and even product development. But for most companies, the diversity of communities online, and the challenge of learning how to work with them, is daunting. Most companies don’t understand how online communities work, how they make a difference, and how to engage with them.

Among the companies that have tried to work with communities online, many have found that they conversation is dominated by extreme enthusiasts rather than average users, and have concluded that online community is a distraction from their real customers.

That turns out to be a very dangerous mistake.

Rubicon Consulting’s web practice team recently conducted a broad survey of US web users to understand better how people in the US use the web, with a special focus on web community and its effect on consumers.

Source: Rubicon Consulting

Hat tip: HillSearch.org Blog

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 and is filed under Business and Economics, Papers and Presentations, Social Media, Source File, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.