Why do I need a community now?
Beyond the human need, communities in the business world bring many advantages to their company or organization:
In a customer community, we could increase the sales, profitability, or market share through increasing the familiarity with our customers’ audience. We can also create a closer relationship and ensure customer retention. That’s key to helping businesses thrive.
In a product community, a community around a service or physical product that unites the product users, we, as a company, allow an open dialogue between us and the users, and between the users themselves. Instead of giving them a narrow role of end-users or customers only, the community enables a more open acquaintance with the users. It turns them to an integral part of the product development, lets them suggest solutions to bugs, and enhance the brand through super users — the brand ambassadors.
In an internal-organization community, we preserve the employees and create loyalty to the company through increasing employee engagement, creating deep connections and mutual knowledge-sharing.