That trend is less visible than the growth of other types of social networks because B2B communities are often aimed at highly specialized populations and may even be closed to outsiders. However, a growing number of enterprises regard their B2B communities as a secret weapon that gives them a powerful competitive advantage.

What’s an Online Community?

Simply put, an online community is a website where users can publish content and form relationships with one another. For B2B users, an online community can be a networking opportunity, a chance to collaborate, a place to gather and share knowledge.

A company that launches a B2B community is opening a direct line for engaging in an ongoing conversation with those users, which can lead to enormous business benefits.

Special Requirements of B2B Communities

When developing an online community—of any kind—it’s important to start with a clear vision of your goals and your target users. A B2B community is no exception.

However, your goals and target users for a B2B community are likely to be quite different from those for a community aimed at end consumers. Those differences will shape everything you do, from the website design to the types of activities you will offer, your communication style, the type of community management required, and strategic decisions about how you will recruit your members and whom you will permit to join.

Some special issues with B2B:

• Recruitment: Since a B2B community is likely to be aimed at a highly specific population, you’ll need a focused recruitment strategy to get the right people—and enough of them—to join.
• Activity level: If your B2B community is restricted to clients or partners, or if it’s focused on a narrow industry sector, your potential user population is probably quite small. Therefore, a higher level of staff interaction may be required to get members involved and to maintain a minimum activity level in the community.
• Member support: Effective community management and member support are important for any online community, but they are critical in a B2B community, where your members may also be key clients and partners. (And a 20-year-old intern is probably not the right person to manage relations with those members.)
• Control of information: A B2B community is likely to be engaged in discussions closely related to your business activity, discussions that may include your clients, partners, or competitors. You’ll therefore need to balance the values of transparency and the sharing of knowledge and ideas with the need to protect sensitive information.

Benefits of a B2B Community

B2B communities can provide a company with customer insights, attract new clients, or strengthen relationships with existing clients, partners, or suppliers by building trust and loyalty.

Many of the benefits are similar to those offered by a brand community for consumers, but they are potentially magnified in a B2B context, where the reasons behind customer decisions can be more difficult to ascertain and where trust can play a critical role in high-stakes purchase decisions.

For B2B customers even more than consumers, the loyalty engendered by a brand community is likely to translate into sales, according to Debi Kleiman, vice-president of product marketing at Communispace, which builds and manages private customer communities for more than 100 brands.

“These are buyers of services and products worth millions of dollars,” says Kleiman. “It makes a difference if you can really engage them with your brand and products, and relate to them on a day-to-day basis.”

Getting Started

If you’re thinking of launching a B2B community, your first step should be to clearly outline your business objectives. Are your goals…

• To increase brand awareness?
• To gain market insights?
• To co-innovate with customers?
• To attract new clients?
• To improve client satisfaction?
• To network with other companies in your sector?
• To build supplier relations?

Based on your goals, decide who your target users will be: Who do you want in your community?

• Current clients?
• Partners?
• Potential clients?
• Suppliers?
• Other industry players?

Make all other decisions about your community with your target users in mind. Your community won’t work unless they participate, and the best way to ensure their ongoing participation is to ensure that your community is fulfilling a genuine need of theirs.

So study your target users. If they are in the same business as you are, you have a head start because you already know the issues facing your industry. Call some of your target users and brainstorm with them—this is also an opportunity to stir up interest in your community project and to strengthen your professional relationships. Send out a survey; set up a focus group.

Questions to answer:

• What needs do your target users have?
• What other resources (online and offline) are available to help target users with their work?
• What’s missing? What gap can your community fill?
• What tools can your community provide to help target users with their daily professional activities?

Your community concept is likely to arise naturally from the answers to those questions. Then you can start working out the details of the activities you will offer members and the website that will house those activities.

Case Studies

American Express has launched Business Travel ConneXion, a community for clients and suppliers of the company’s professional travel services.

The community offers members a wide range of options that show some of the activities that can be useful to B2B members. Business Travel ConneXion members can participate in forum discussions, webinars, and live chats on topics related to business travel (e.g., “Innovation and Technology in Business Travel” or “Travel & Procurement Manager Best Practices”); they can form and join groups focused on specific themes (e.g., “Green Travel Summit” or “Houston Travel Community”); they can add and view events of interest on a shared calendar; they can vote in polls; they can even maintain their own blogs on the Business Travel ConneXion platform; and, of course, they can directly contact other members via a guest-book function.

The community also includes several less-interactive features, such as industry articles and whitepapers. Although such resources can add enormous value to your community, they should complement, not replace, activities that involve member participation and interaction.

If your website plan focuses too heavily on content generated by your organization, then you can end up with a knowledge center or an online magazine rather than a real community.

Sun Microsystems is the sponsor of another interesting project, Openec, a website focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sustainable business practices.

In addition to a community discussion forum with a private internal-messaging system, the website offers members a range of tools for calculating greenhouse gas emissions and comparing their energy and emissions performance with those of other participating organizations.

A community such as Openec’s that is focused on providing professional tools for its members should offer benefits that can’t easily be obtained elsewhere on the Web.

Common tools such as calculators or currency converters won’t keep anyone coming to your website because they are available from too many other sources. However, developing a unique tool for your clients—whether it’s a technical application, a database, or a marketplace—can turn your website into part of their daily professional lives.

Open or Closed?

The two communities mentioned above are examples of open communities, which anyone can join.

An open community is the obvious choice if your goals include attracting new clients, increasing website traffic, or outreach of any kind, or if you have a community model—such as an online marketplace—that depends on a large member base or that requires a high volume of activity.

An open community will permit many recruitment options, such as search-engine marketing and word-of-mouth. It will be much easier with this model to build up content and activity on your community.

With a closed community, on the other hand, you gain intimacy and control over the type of member who joins and the flow of information. Closed communities are therefore often preferable for market research and co-innovation purposes.

For example, Communispace’s communities, which focus primarily on insight and innovation, are normally closed groups of about 300 representative customers. Kleiman explains: “The companies can ask for feedback on new ideas, on new marketing programs in a private, closed environment that’s confidential and where the discussion isn’t taking place in front of competitors.”

Something for Everyone

As with any marketing project, a B2B community should be developed with specific business goals in mind. But even as you work to obtain benefits for your company, you must also work to provide benefits to your community’s target users.

You can’t have a community without members. And busy businesspeople won’t participate in your community unless they are getting a real return on their time and effort. Keep your eye on their goals as well as your company’s, and offer something for everyone to ensure that your project will be a success.

Anna Buss spoke with Uwe Thomas, CEO of Independent Collectors GmbH, Berlin, Germany.

A community for art collectors – who come up with this unusual idea?
One of the founders, Christian Schwarm, collects contemporary art by himself and knows what’s going on in that environment. The problem is that many of these collectors are unintended mavericks. They are art experts and highly interested in this field but have no one to talk about it at their level. Our idea was to create a platform for collectors to contact like minded people worldwide and share their thoughts.

So you started this community from the very beginning? The launch phase is known as a very critical step for every founder. How did you manage this?
Actually, everything begun with exactly two members: Christian Schwarm and Tommi Brem. Christian Schwarm has experience asa collector, Tommi Brem was a newbie.

What’s your strategy to let the community grow?
We take care for Search Engine Optimization. It’s important that Google finds us. But we don’t do any advertising because we can predict the behaviour of our target group: They are keen to get to know other art experts and collectors. So, one way is that you discover the community by yourself. The other way to join the community is a recommendation. Or, if you like, you can contact me via Xing to get an invitation code.

Are you not afraid that your target group is too small to let a community grow longterm?
Not at all. If you take a look at the German art scene: There are thousands of people who collect contemporary art. No idea, how many collectors we can count all over the world. Enough to let the community grow and keep it lively.

But why should I join your community? As an alternative, I can go to Facebook, to Xing or even to Flickr. I can upload pictures of my collection and meet others who are interested in contemporary art. What’s the advantage of your communities?
It is the quality of our members that makes the difference. We are very picky and do not accept everybody. If you have a recommendation, no problem. But if a new member knocks at our door, we take our time to check if this newbie is really a collector. And not a sales person who looks for a new distribution channel.

This means, community management plays an important role for you?
Yes, we take a lot of care for our members to get to know them in person. For example, we organize offline events. We offer VIP tickets for art fairs, for example. Whenever we do meet members offline, this special community-feeling becomes concrete. But there is another reason why this community needs careful management: A good community manager is someone to trust in. It is essential for our members that their personal data and their profile information is in good hands. Our members can decide how anonymous they want to be at the community. Nobody wants to tell the world that she or he has tons of treasures at home, you know. So we offer our members the possibility to open their profile and online exhibitions for the whole community or for their contacts within the community only. We even let the users close a part of their online exhibitions with a special password. And they can hide their profile from Google.

Are there other special needs of your users?
Yes. We made the experience that the majority of our users do not have great online knowledge. They are not familiar with complex functionalities. They do not bring years of experience. This means that we need a strong focus on usability. Everything must kept strictly simple. And here, it is a stroke of luck that the founders of the community combine a 10 years experience in community building with art expertise.

How do you right now earn money?
With sponsoring. We are proud to welcome BMW as our first global partner! Art exhibitions, art fairs but also art transport companies, hotels or insurances are very interested in our target group. In the future, we do plan premium memberships. And we have other plans … but I don’t want to give away a secret. So stay tuned and watch our community carefully.

In an interview for Online Communities Handbook, Ciao.com’s Managing Director, Stephan Musikant, shared some of the strategies that helped shape Ciao’s success, and discussed best practices for member recruitment and member remuneration, balancing the needs of different types of different users, and the importance of taking a long-term quality approach to community-building.

Our publishers, Pearson Education and New Riders, have kindly allowed us to offer an excerpt of this interview for free download. You can get it here.

Here are two videos introducing the community’s concept.

Anna discovered this t-shirt, described by its creators, Despair.com as, “A gorgeous, 8-color masterpiece which captures ever so brilliantly the three behavioral disorders propelling the continued phenomenal growth of today’s most widely-trafficked social media sites. And at the intersection of the dysfunctional forces of Narcissism, ADHD, and Stalking resides today’s fastest growing social media experiment of all- Twitter.”

Changes in the age structure of social networks can create a critical situation for these communities.

Online networking is no longer dominated by younger users. Look at the international social network Xing: 37% of all members are older than 40. One example is the Spanish group “Mayores de 40 años” which has more than 4.500 members. “Older users are very motivated to organize events at the social network”, says Angela Rittig. As a Xing manager, she monitors this data carefully. In March 2009, 50% of all Xing-related events were organized by 40-50 year old members. Another example of this trend is Facebook: started as a service for university students, during the last months the network has added almost twice as many 50-64 year old users as new visitors under 18 years old.

The same effects are found in a study created in spring 2009 by The Nielsen Company: the biggest growth rate in social networks is seen in the group of users between 35 and 49 years old. The audience is becoming increasingly broader and older.

This development could create a critical situation if you look at advertising earnings: the clear, simple design with reduced advertising space seemed to be a motor of Facebook’s success. And maybe MySpace - a network that still has a younger audience - has a design that is too busy for 40+ people. But this busy design contains much space for ads. As a result, Facebook can attract more older users but does not have enough advertising space, and MySpace cannot attract older users but offers advertising space.

The attractive book is a “best of” directory quoting 11870.com of the restaurants, shops, and bars that generated the most discussion in the 11870.com community. What a good idea! There is also a digital version of the book available for free download here: http://11870.com/imprescindibles

I can think of many other communities with user-generated content that could be edited into useful books. For example:

• Sites with travel reviews and commentary
• Sites with book and movie reviews
• Recipe sites
• Creative writing sites
• Sites where users are sharing tips related to a specific hobby
• Sites where users are sharing advice on a specific life problem
• Sites where users are debating a topic (not too time-sensitive) of general interest.

I’m not thinking about a book that would necessarily be for commercial distribution. But why not follow the example of 11870.com? You can:

• Send the book as a gift to members to reward their contributions and increase their loyalty.
• Encourage members who create high-quality content by turning them into published authors (In 11870.com’s book, each review and photograph is credited with the author’s login name).
• Use the book as a viral marketing tool to promote your community.

If you decide to make a book out of your community’s content, you should consult with a legal counsel about copyright issues. 11870.com’s book is published under a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use.

• Recruit from your corporate websites. Add banners promoting your community. If you have an e-commerce site, send visitors to your community after they complete a purchase.
• Recruit from your company mailing list. Send out a special campaign presenting your community as a free benefit for customers. If you send out a customer newsletter, feature your community there. Integrate your community with your customer support activities, and have your support team recruit for you.
• Recruit with rented e-mail lists. There are several companies which have highly qualified databases and can provide lists according to the type of users you want to target. As a long-term approach, this can be expensive and can bring in lower-quality members than other recruitment channels, but it is an easy way to build up critical mass to get things started.
• Recruit through your advertising. Where appropriate, include your community URL in your company’s TV and print campaigns.
• Recruit through search engine optimization. If you are at the beginning of your community project, make sure your website is built with SEO in mind. Design activities where members are generating large amounts of text content and, where possible, include activities related to frequently searched key words.
• Recruit through search engine marketing. Buy sponsored links on search engines with Google AdWords. Just make sure that the key words you use are very relevant to your community’s content to avoid wasting money on clicks from visitors who will leave as soon as they arrive.
• Recruit through viral marketing. Offer rewards to members for referring others to the site; offer links on the website to share content through e-mail, RSS, social bookmarking; provide branded tools, images, and gadgets for republication.
• Recruit through social networks and blogs. The European rural tourism site, Toprural.com, for example, has profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, posts photos on Flickr and videos on Youtube, and maintains blogs in five languages. The Spanish travel community Minube.com uses Facebook Connect and has designed a travel application for Facebook. These are all powerful ways to get the word out.

In an interview for our book, Debi Kleiman from Communispace, a company that builds and manages private customer communities for over 100 brands, said that they’d found 300-500 members to be the optimal size for communities aimed specifically at gathering customer insights. Such communities normally depend on a high degree of interaction between members and the sponsoring company, and limiting the size allows for greater intimacy.

However, for most community models, a much larger population is required. Keep in mind that only a small percentage of members are likely to participate actively. The Spanish community 11870.com told me they had found that 5-10 percent of their members were contributing 90% of the content. Applying this rule, if you have 300 members in your community, you’re looking at 15-30 active contributors. With 15-30 active contributors, it will be very hard to keep the community sufficiently dynamic to hold members’interest. When members log on, they are likely to find that not much has changed since their last visit and that they are practically alone on the platform. This significantly reduces the chances that they will log on again. In other words, if you don’t achieve a large enough base population, the natural tendency may be for your community to shrink rather than to grow.

Size also has obvious advantages if your business goals for the community include any of the following:

• Search engine optimization
• Content generation
• Generation of ad revenue
• Viral marketing
• PR benefits
• Increased traffic on your e-commerce site

I’ll post here soon about some ways to recruit members to a community.

13 reasons your Facebook account will be disabled

Apparently (and logically), Facebook have partially automated the policing of the site and are disabling user accounts based on suspicious behavior patterns. One result: outrage and public protest from the banned users and their friends.

Which of these users have actually abused the site and which have been unjustly blocked? Very hard to say. Analyzing each user’s story and all circumstantial evidence related to his or her individual case is extremely time-consuming, and it is often impossible for the community manager to be sure of making the right call. Considering that Facebook have now reached 200 million members, a population approximately two thirds the size of the whole United States, Facebook’s community managers have their work cut out for them.

Here are a few principles that make it easier to get through community management challenges:

1. Have your legal counsel draft a Terms of Service statement which give your company full authority to close accounts at your discretion and protect you from liability. Users should sign this at registration.
2. Automate community management functions wherever you can do so without affecting the quality of the service. This frees up community managers to work where they are adding value.
3. Give your community managers clear priorities. Otherwise, there’s a risk that they will take their priorities where they are getting the most feedback — from the community members, whose interests might not match your company’s.
4. Empower your community managers to make judgment calls in individual cases. No matter how comprehensive the set of rules and reply templates you provide, there will always be plenty of situations that don’t fit. Choose community managers whose judgment you trust and then authorize them to use it.