Segment Your Brand Community Participants Part 2

Last week, I wrote about four categories of brand community participants: the devotees, the tourists, the minglers, and the insiders. In Part 2 of this series, let me discuss how you can identify these different types of participants through their observable behavior in your community.

 


Image by Lieutenant Pol | CC 2.0

The Devotees:
The devotees are probably the most difficult to identify among the four categories, because these individuals are most likely lurkers that mostly keep it to themselves. But by combining community log data, it is still possible to recognizing such users. Signs of a devotees include:

  • Moderate to frequent visit to the community.
  • Rarely contributes to the conversation. If we were to calculate a ratio of posting to reading activities from the user’s activity log, the ratio should be quite low.
  • For reading activities, the user reads mostly information/exchanges directly related to the brand. The average time spent on these brand-related messages is also disproportionately higher than non-brand-related messages.
  • If a following or friending system exists in the community, a devotee is likely to have a small number of friends, and is likely to only follow well-respected members who know a lot about the brand.

Continue reading “Segment Your Brand Community Participants Part 2”

Segment Your Brand Community Participants Part 1

If you are a socially savvy brand, most likely you are already engaging your customers in some form of online community, either through your own branded online community such as Kraft Foods’ recipe exchange community, or through a third-party social media platform such as what Starbucks is doing on Twitter. In managing the participants in these communities, it can be very helpful to segment the participants so that you can identify the unique value of each participant and involve them accordingly. In this three-part series, I would like to discuss a four-segment scheme that you can implement in your online community. The origin of this four-segment scheme came from Professor Robert Kozinets’ early work on online communities. Although the original idea was published a while back in 1999, it is still a classic for managing communities today.

Continue reading “Segment Your Brand Community Participants Part 1”