Getting Payback from Community

How should B2B marketers focus their community efforts to provide compelling content for members and business value for their companies? For some answers, we went to Bill Johnston, who blogs about online community strategy and runs the Online Community Research Network, a membership organization of online community professionals working to better understand the principal challenges of building and managing online communities. Johnston is also director of Community and Research for research company Forum One Communications and has built B2B communities for software maker Autodesk and IT research and publishing company TechRepublic.

ITSMA: Bill, you recently did a survey of your members about the ROI of community. So, are marketers getting value from communities?

Bill Johnston: The caveat that will be hanging off many of my answers is it depends, because different organizations have different goals and therefore different ways to quantify or qualify value. For example, content creation often is a more legitimate source of value to these companies than fiduciary-based measurement.

ITSMA: Does the lack of direct financial return pose a threat to the future of communities?

Johnston: Even though there is not a direct bottom-line dollar figure coming back to the community sponsors, they are at this point still okay investing in them as a growth mechanism. No one is giving up on them.

The net on benefits is that people have cited everything from deeper engagement to actual improvement on sales conversions for folks participating in a community.

But the one that comes up the most is that communities help solve problems faster and more efficiently. It’s exponentially more expensive for companies to provide one-on-one support to customers than it is to provide peer-based support through communities—particularly around technology products. Forrester Research found that the cost per interaction in customer support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. And when you consider that Cisco’s own research found that 43% of its support forum visits are in lieu of opening up a support case, the savings become significant.

ITSMA: Are there other paybacks?

Johnston: Folks in communities are extending product knowledge well beyond this domain of the company that created the product. For example, they may come up with novel uses that the company’s designers never contemplated.

Many folks are also reporting increases in traffic to their main Websites from the communities and more time spent on-site. For example, we had verbatim responses in the survey that said things like, “Our members consumed 49% more page views per session than nonmembers.” They are also seeing a quantifiably more engaged relationship with customers and prospects because of the community site.

ITSMA: What are the business benefits of that increased engagement?

Johnston: We are still building a data set to quantify that, but I would say—this is officially my own opinion at this point—but I would say that it definitely leads to more loyalty and in some cases more evangelism.

I know that when I ran the community at [software provider] Autodesk, our community members skewed higher on brand loyalty to Autodesk and were more likely to recommend Autodesk products than nonmembers were.

ITSMA: Let me play devil’s advocate on that one and ask, aren’t people who tend to join user communities already more likely to be satisfied users than those who don’t join communities?

Johnston: Excellent question. My response to that is, you are aggregating a base of very passionate and active users, and so what’s the problem with that? Because you are giving these guys a place to play, you are giving these guys concepts and activities to rally around; the byproduct of that is going to be creating users who are even more passionate.

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