Owning communities and marketing in social media

There are good days and there are not so good days. The good days happen when I’m minding my own business and people like Jeremiah drop into my inbox with a collection of links to a really interesting bit of conversation going on in the blogosphere.

It turns out that asking the question “should brands join or build a community?” is also “who owns a community?” which is also “can you own a community?”

This is cool. Let me break it down.

Jeremiah wants to know if brands should build a community or join a community. Doc Searls brought the conversation out of Facebook, and thinks that community inherently excludes inanimate things like brands. Bill Johnston thinks a brand can and should own* a community. Dawn seems to think that having some self-owned communities is a good idea (and therefore the inverse is true: brands should not always try to own communities). And Shel Israel thinks that Jeremiah is starting to play the “how can marketers manipulate social media” game.

If I’ve misrepresented anyone, correct me in the comments.

As is usually the case when you get several smart people talking about the same thing, they’re all correct (even Jeremiah, who was asking a question — isn’t that impressive?).

Jeremiah is right because now is the time to start asking questions about how brands (this means marketers, companies) should engage in the online communities that exist within Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others. Now is the right time because now is when companies are going to start engaging, whether “we” want them to or not.

I think it might be a little unfair for Shel to accuse Jeremiah of, essentially, forgetting about his community. He’s not. He’s just decided to be proactive instead of sticking his fingers in his ears and going “LALALALALALALALA.”

That said, Shel and Doc both have a good point: communities happen because of the people (duh) not because of the brands. In other words, in the communities where I participate, I am participating as me, not as Parnassus Group or Web Community Forum. Really, those brands have no official standing in a social network (despite funky things like Facebook Pages — you think the Page actually counts as a member of the community?).

Marketers should make a careful note of that. Your brand is not and never will be a real part of the community. Only you can be.

However.

Bill is also right. In a lot of cases, a “brand” should really set out to “own” a community. Notice the words in quotes? Let’s reshape those so you know what (I think) Bill means: a “brand” really refers to a collection of people. “Own” means getting in there and being REALLY visible.

If the Parnassus Group brand were going to go pwn own the Web Strategy Group, that would mean Teresa and Steve and Kim and I getting in there, clearing out spam (if we have the permissions), starting conversations, finishing conversations, and making friends with other members.

And finally, Dawn is also right. It doesn’t make sense for every community to have a strong brand presence. It’s like the difference between the Mashable feed on Twitter and the Jason Calacanis feed on Twitter.

Twitter is unique because I can follow whoever I want. I follow both of these. But the Mashable feed (blog posts from mashable, not really about a person) is appropriate from some communities and not for others. Jason Calacanis is a person, and freaking entertaining one, and I think you’d have a hard time finding someone who would say he’s not welcome in a community.

But does the Mahalo brand have a presence on Twitter because of it? Darn tootin’ it does.

And that’s why you can no longer really separate brands from people in online communities. Which is why everyone here is a little bit right.

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*own, used here, means essentially the same thing that moderating a forum means.

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