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What is an enterprise online community? An enterprise online community is a community created by an organization - typically a corporation, or "enterprise" - to accomplish business goals. Enterprise communities have all the traditional advantages of any online community, but have very different requirements. In short, they require a dual focus on the goals of members and the goals of the enterprise.
There are different types of enterprise communities. There are real differences, for example, between communities in different industries such as high technology, media, retail, or travel. A simpler but equally meaningful distinction is based on community composition: are users primarily customers, partners, or employees? The answer has significant implications for all aspects of technology and management.
Customer Support Communities
As the name implies, customer support communities are part of a company's overall customer care and support process. These communities typically focus exclusively on user-to-user support, providing a place for customers to answer questions posed by other customers. However, in some cases company experts also answer questions, usually when they can't be answered by other users (for example, when they involve account-specific matters) or when users haven't replied over a pre-defined period of time (commonly two or three business days).
Companies create support communities because they can be a highly effective way of answering customer questions at a lower cost than other support channels. Some good examples of this type of community include the Symantec Technology Network, AT&T Wireless Forums, and the Linksys Community Forums.
Engagement Communities
Also known as affinity or loyalty communities, and encompassing what are sometimes called marketing or brand communities, engagement communities bring together people who are passionate about a particular product, topic, or pursuit. The wide reach of the online medium means that engagement communities can form around topics or products whose appeal might otherwise seem relatively narrow. Companies create engagement communities for a variety of reasons: to build loyalty, to drive web site traffic, and to gather feedback and ideas. Some good examples of successful engagement communities are the Playstation.com Forums, the Car and Driver Forums, the Barnes & Noble Book Clubs, and the Comcast Community Forums.
In reality, these categories often - and should - overlap and merge. Support communities that don't cater to their engagements are missing a great opportunity. Engagement communities that don't support their members in some way in pursuing their passion are unlikely to succeed.
The most common example of a partner community today is the developer community. Software companies often rely on a network of software developers outside their organization to implement, adapt, and refine their product. Developer communities are a tool for supporting these large distributed groups, enabling them to collaborate effectively and providing a place to share with them the latest news and developments. Two good examples of developer communities include Salesforce.com's Apex Developer Network, the PayPal Developer Community, and the National Instruments Developer Zone Discussion Forums.
Finally, employee communities are platforms for supporting collaboration among globally distributed groups of people working for the same company. As part of a community implementation aimed at customers or partners, companies sometimes use Lithium's private forums capability to support internal groups as well. However, because this is a very small part of the work we do, you'll see relatively little on this topic in Community Central - which is not to say it isn't an important topic in enterprise online communities.
