A Short History of B2B Community
Posted On: March 31st, 2010 by Heather Strout
When I started in the field of community building in 2006, social media and community building was a bit of the Wild West. Companies building online communities were few and far between, and experimentation and patience were key. To be fair, online communities have been around since before LISTSERV was created in 1986. They were not called online communities, but the principle was the same, getting a group of people together to talk about topics relevant to them. Many of these eventually evolved into online forums and extended into online communities, including member profiles, wiki documentation pages and blogs.
Small groups were forming in the 1990s and early 2000s but the fuse was lit in about 2006-2007 when companies like Shared Insights (now Mzinga), Jive, Leverage software, Awareness, Inc. Communispace and a handful of others started gaining traction in the community space. Social Networking, Social Media and Online Communities were starting to get buzz. At that time, online community building was so new, there were few best practices. The good news for me was that most of the companies I was working with as a Community Strategist at Shared Insights were ready to hear that solid strategy, not tools, is what’s required to build a successful online community.
In the past year, those whose job it is to build or manage social media/social marketing/online communities have struggled with defining the purpose of each. I think we have finally started to round the corner on that issue. For example, note how one expert, Rachel Happe, has evolved her thinking and her ability to define roles in this industry. Read the post she wrote almost two years ago, and and compare that to the one she wrote just a few days ago. Notice the evolution. In her first post, she begins to explain what community is in context of why it’s not social media. Her thoughts on the subject seem less concise than they are in her recent post. Having read her post then, it really represented where we were as an industry, only emergent in our thoughts on the difference between the two concepts. The comments on that post allude to this as well. In her second post, her language is more concise, she is able to define both community and social media, and how each might apply to business. You will also note, her examples of when to use each are more concrete. She’s even able to define responsibilities required for the two different roles. Her ability to delineate between the two roles of social media and community management is representative of how the industry has matured over the past year.
You hear about b2c communities regularly in the news, but there are many very vibrant b2b communities that warrant attention. Why don’t you know about these communities? These tend to have a niche audience so there’s not such a big effort to get these into mainstream news. Here are a few examples:
- commonground from EDR– the global social network for environmental and commercial real estate due diligence professionals.
- The Center for CIO Leadership – a global community to advance the CIO profession. (managed by Farland Group)
- MarketingProfs know-how exchange – the most vibrant marketing forum on the web.
While there are successful b2b communities, there are still many opportunities for companies in the b2b arena to take advantage of an online community strategy to understand, communicate with, and reach out to their customer. In the next 3-5 years, we’ll see an explosion of b2b communities, communities and social media built into the fabric of many organizations, and a better understanding of what social media and online communities mean for business.