A Conversation About B2B Online Communities

Posted by Vanessa DiMauro on January 14, 2011

0 comments | 1312 reads

Writing a blog on a regular basis means you spend a lot of time listening to your own thoughts and writing them down. If you're conscientious about reading them later, there will be occasional nods and winces when encountering the good and not-so-good stuff in one's own writing.

But it's quite another thing to read a well-crafted Q&A interview conducted by a skilled interviewer -- especially when the interviewee is oneself! I had the great pleasure of sitting and talking with Bloom Group President Bob Buday recently, and together we went over the key aspects of creating successful B2B online communities -- you'll find the whole interview on the Bloom Group site.

Re-reading this interview, I was struck by how Bob uncovered a certain amount of online history. Those of us who have been working in this field for many years sometimes lose sight of just how far we have traveled, while still confronting the same human issues of building trust, fostering communications and establishing mutually beneficial relationships using digital media.

Inquiring about some early work we did on ARPANET, Bob asked what we had learned:

"The ability to get experts to make their approaches transparent is the critical success factor for making professional online communities successful. How do you get experts and professionals to share the details of their practice? How do you guide them and intervene in online discussions so they explain how they think about and do things?
These lessons are important for the work we do with B2B online communities as well as intranets or knowledge networks. The human puzzle remains the same whether it is within a project team in an organization or within an organization’s clients – a set of customers that constitutes a peer group."

It's still a human puzzle, because successful online communities do not depend on specific technologies, but rather, on the underlying needs and behaviors of people. Building online communities for business means understanding what community members need and how an online community can meet those needs.

Sounds like a good resolution for 2011!

Republished with author's permission from original post by Vanessa DiMauro.

Vanessa DiMauro

Vanessa DiMauro is CEO of Leader Networks, a research and strategy firm that helps organizations create enterprise-level online communities. She is an Executive In Residence at Babson College, and serves as a Research Fellow for the Society of New Communications. She works with leading companies to create social media strategy and align with operations for positive results.

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