Online Branded Communities: Misguided and Missing the Point

If you ask brand managers the purpose of online communities, the reply you’ll most often hear is “customer engagement.” Among marketers, this term is more prevalent than Frisbees at a dog beach.

But the real question is this: Are brands providing meaningful and engaging experiences to their customers through their online communities? Our research on 135 online communities representing 45 major brands indicates that, with few exceptions, the answer is no.

Nearly half of the brands in the study were still in the social marketing experimentation stage, showing fairly robust levels of activity but lacking an integrated strategy across multiple communities and social media. Almost one quarter of the communities were “ghost towns,” mere facades with little or no member participation.