One client is in the early stages of community development.
It's a highly specialized community. It targets people within a niche, of a niche, of a niche. The total target audience is no more than a few hundred people.
Why bother with a community that targets a few hundred people?
Because these are the few hundred people that matter. They are the people whom make buying decisions, give proper feedback, and use the products/services.
Individuals in these communities can each be worth six to seven figures in revenue. This tiny, exclusive, community that no-one will know about (that's by choice), can generate a greater ROI than the likes of Dell, Best Buy, and most of the communities you've heard about.
Whilst it might be the huge, customer-facing, communities that get all the attention. I suspect it's the small, exclusive, communities that generate the bigger ROI.
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I agree with this post completely, thank you for writing it Richard. I work for an online education company and I recently completed a community project which is designed to primarily serve our clients. We have a (good) problem - growth over the last several years has been around 20-30%, but we haven't been able to scale our support teams to support that growth in clients. We're moving to shift our model to rely more heavily on self-serve support via our community - clients can find the resources they need, and if they still need help, they can ask a question. This way, either our support team, or other clients, can provide an answer. For us, the community will likely always be small (1,000-2,000 users), but if we can effectively get our clients using the site for support & collaboration, our operational costs will be greatly reduced. For this reason, I am not concerned about it becoming a large, publicly-facing community, but rather a smaller, focused and successful 'niche' community.
Posted by: Scott Holm | Tuesday, 31 January 2012 at 18:29