Whose Community is it Anyway?

Inspired by a LinkedIn Group my team has created for one of our clients, the nature of 
community has been bouncing around my brain. While marketers for years now have jumped into places like Facebook and LinkedIn and build large 'followings' I feel few are really considering these to be communities. For many, they are simply an extension of their spam email list, another 'channel' (apologies for today's inverted comma overload) into which marketing messages can be randomly thrown.

With vultures circling over Twitter and Google+, it's absolutely time to reassess your community investment. I challenge companies to go back to basics, and ask themselves three simple questions:

1. Who is your audience?

2. What do they want from you / their peers?

3. Does this community give it to them?

If you put your existing communities through this lens, how do they rate? Questions worth asking in the never-ending quest to rationalize marketing tactics and encourage our buyers to buy...

This post first appeared in my LinkedIn profile here.