NMK Article - From Customer to Community

The branding professionals seem to have figured out the value, and importance, of communities. It's not exactly earth shattering stuff for those of us who already have an understanding of digital communities, but it's sometimes useful to be able to forward stuff like this on to the boss, particularly if they're getting tired of you telling them the story about the users who got married whenever he/she asks you for an up-to-date measurement of the ROI of your community spaces. ;-)

From NMK: "the first in a series of articles exploring the new digitally-empowered communities shaking up and transforming the business landscape. By Alan Moore, co-author with telecoms guru Tomi Ahonen of the book Communities Dominate Brands... it explains how creating, connecting and engaging communities is the way in which businesses will develop greater customer advocacy and financial success in the early 21st Century..."

From Customer To Community - April 5 2005
http://www.nmk.co.uk/article/2005/04/05/communities-dominate-brands1

Comments

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi Cybersoc

Thank you for the mention. Yes, our brand new book, Communities Dominate Brands, is what we believe to be the first business book to look comprehensively at that new phenomenon of digitally connected and empowered communities. We've seen many excellent treaties of single elements of that, from blogging, to videogaming, to mobile phone based smart mobs; and of course the various worries of disruption from convergence; and the decline of the effectiveness of traditional advertising.

But so far nobody put these snippets into the big picture. In our book we discuss the trends and then develop an overriding theory to explain the full big picture, and we arrive at the inevitable conclusion that the time of branding coming to the end, and the time of customer-communities is just dawning. In a few years all businesses, in all industries, have to shift from interruptive "preaching" advertising and marketing communications, to engagement marketing of activating the customer. For that our book is a guide and handbook, with over 100 named business examples from around the world, and 13 case studies. For more about the book, visit our blogsite at www.communities_dominate.blogs.com or the book's official website by our publisher, www.futuretext.com

Dominate !

Tomi Ahonen
Co-Author of Communities Dominate Brands, 2005