KonzeptioNerd

Community Marketing Management … for Beginners

I’m reading Frank Mühlenbeck’s and Klemens Skibicki’s Community Marketing Management because I’m currently researching online community theory, but I’m not sure reviewing it here is the best of ideas. Let’s see. CMM has various problems, the biggest one appears to be target group insecurity.

Mühlenbeck and Skibicki appear to be talking to a rather concise audience of entrepreneurs who plan on starting up an online community and they’re trying to be as comprehensive as they can be in just over 200 pages. So part of the pervading shallowness of the book may be owed to the sheer breadth of topics scraped - from chat software to media planning. But the authors also appear to be addressing an audience with barely rudimentary internet literacy, people who don’t know a flame war from an avatar - and, honestly, this particular demographic, be they great managers or business strategists, will probably not be the types of people who come up with brilliant online-strategies. This is not to say that they might not have an online community or two in their portfolios - but someone who can not name a couple of banner types off their cuff are unlikely to be able to build an online community by following the step by step directions supplied in this manual.

And I’m afraid I must say that the authors might know their business administration inside out and have a grasp of the overall mechanisms behind online communities - but they appear not to be too web savvy, themselves. Explaining that an avatar is basically a “type of cartoon figure” or reminding the reader to “make sure that usability is present” is oversimplifying and then some.

Other issues let me suspect that this simplification is not carfeully tageted at a group of readers who have other emphases than internet specifica: for one, there’s the atrocious proof-reading and havoc hyphenation. There’s lack of structure, at times it appears the authors just slammed a host of knowledge onto the pages, some subchapters consist more or less of single paragraphs, running over one and a half or two pages. There are no figures to substantiate claims that appear, as it is, rather wholesale. Many of the claims are based on observations made on dating sites - and I hesistate to accept dating sites as prototypical online communities. All in all, Community Marketing Management remains on one level with Hagel and Armstrong’s (10 years older!) Net Gain.

But, here’s what makes Community Marketing Management interesting: I don’t have Net Gain here, but as far as I remember, Hagel and Armstrong are trying to isolate strategies for introducing monetarization mechanisms into the then burgeoning and increasingly popular web or virtual communities. In short, their magic formular was: create a vertical community and then open the gates for vendors of relevant products.

This didn’t work the first time around. Perhaps Mühlenbeck and Skibicki’s much quoted “authenticity” was at cause: the sales pitch ruins the community feeling. Perhaps the reason is that the internet is not a Kaffeefahrt (wonderfully cheap bus day trip, usually marketed to senior citizens; during the coffee break, there’s a sales promotion that usually won’t stop until a certain contingent has been sold) - consumers can easily click outside the community to compare and shop elsewhere.

And in 2nd wave communities, this concept doesn’t seem to work out, either. Just look at what happened to Facebook, StudiVZ, XING in the last two or three months. The more promising strategy appears to be to introduce community or “social” elements into an e-commerce site: powershopping, recommendation marketing, sale of user generated products or content. Mühlenbeck and Skibicki take profit as a key success criterion of online communities, but ignore social commerce. And although they do mention brand communities, they make no connection. They do, however, have an entire book dedicated to social commerce. So maybe that’s why …

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