Companies are successfully leveraging private, online communities that allow them to deeply connect with customers and capture insights that lead to groundbreaking ideas, helping to fuel growth and innovation. From our experience facilitating online communities over the past decade, we’ve found that panels, chat rooms, blogs, and focus groups just skim the surface compared to what you can learn from continuously talking with customers in their communities.

However, we’ve also observed that companies’ instincts on how to manage their communities are often too self serving, relying on research techniques rather than social networking engagement principles. The reality is that running communities is counterintuitive to what marketers typically do when they get a group of customers together. It’s not about just asking questions and getting feedback, although plenty of that goes on in communities. Nor is it about responding to and trying to “fix” negative issues that customers raise. It is about creating a sense of community among people with common interests, and then tapping into the community in multiple ways, through a variety of methodologies to get into the hearts and minds of customers.