Aligning Community Features to Customer Motivations

by Adam Loving on October 5, 2009

At last week’s Social Media Club Seattle Meeting, Sean Moffitt presented on “Wiki-brands.” He coined this term to describe companies with successful (active) customer communities after interviewing a slew of very large companies.

One slide that particularly interested me from Sean’s presentation was one on “Matching Community Incentives to Motivation”. He indicated that there were patterns of human behavior (motivations) that you should aim to please with community features.

I have stolen a slide out of Sean’s presentation, and re-worded things very slightly to match my own experiences with HelpShare, Lookmarks, and most recently Twibes Twitter Groups. This chart indicates the type of motivation, and the type of community feature that can facilitate that motivation. I color-coded the features applicable to Twibes where we’re doing a good (green), average (yellow), or bad (red) job.

Community Motives

Hopefully this will help you prioritize features for your own online community. Are there other motivations we are missing?

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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

kim October 5, 2009 at 12:34 pm

Thanks for this post, and for this blog, keep up the” good work ;)

PowerPoint Templates October 6, 2009 at 8:19 pm

It is important that you measure results and know what actions result in the best return on investment. In other boards what results translate to profits.

Mathdelane October 16, 2009 at 4:01 pm

I would be more interested on how these may apply to reader experience vs. blog ROI/performance metrics.

Jeff October 31, 2009 at 2:37 am

You’ve given me some great ideas for my brand. Hmmm…now, how to implement them? :)

FYI – You list as “Dofollow” but are appending “nofollow” tags to your links. ;)

Eric November 4, 2009 at 3:12 pm

Great post. Although I do not fully agree with your chart I will agree with the some of it. I need to create a chart like this for my company to see where I need to put more focus in. Thanks for the idea.

myra manning November 9, 2009 at 11:56 pm

As a new blogger, it’s interesting to hear your take on this – especially “Twibes.” It seems like a bit of an advanced concept though to be sure. As an aside, I also use the Thesis theme, and I really like it.

RoTrKO November 21, 2009 at 2:26 am

As a new blogger, it’s interesting to hear your take on this – especially “Twibes.” It seems like a bit of an advanced concept though to be sure. As an aside, I also use the Thesis theme, and I really like it.

tatil otelleri March 6, 2010 at 12:06 pm

Great post. Although I do not fully agree with your chart I will agree with the some of it. I need to create a chart like this for my company to see where I need to put more focus in. Thanks for the idea.

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