Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Mothercare, HMV, and creating strong digital communities

Commercial success in the digital age will belong to those businesses that attract, engage and organise digital communities to meet multiple social and commercial needs. By creating strong digital communities, businesses will be able to build customer loyalty to a degree that today’s marketers can only dream of.

Think of HMV and Mothercare. Would they struggle as much had they developed a community strategy which was embedded into all that they did? Could they have beaten the big supermarkets and internet players by revising their bricks and mortor strategy?

Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her book Evolve says

One company’s loyal community of empowered users is another one’s nemesis.

Cross-posted from the blog for the book Communities Dominate Brands

VNU Blogs & Social Media Forum

I’m on the advisory board for VNU’s Blogs & Social Media Forum, which takes place on May 17 in London. I’ll also be participating in the Making the right connections workshop, with Stormhoek CEO Jason Korman and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein’s Global CIO, JP Rangaswami. (I actually met JP Rangaswami in the check-in line to fly back from Innovate Europe in Zaragoza last year, having an all too brief chat. It’s my good fortune to end up on a panel with him.)

It should be a great event, as we try to rip to shreds the traditional conference format and do something much more participatory and conversational, all while exploring the impact of blogs, RSS, and wikis on business and industry. Sign up today!