3. Creating Social Communities 2

Using a social media platform that supports video, chat, customized user profiles, blogs and discussion forums, they have built a thriving community called "MyRagan" that is over 7,000 members strong. Sounds ridiculous to mention a 7,000 person community in the same breath as Facebook’s 30M and MySpace’s 100M, but you know what? There are a lot of segments like this one where narrower is better, since the community is about intimacy, trust, clear and consistent dialog paths.

A narrowed focus means specialized tools are needed - ones that empower motivated community users to fashion informational sign posts serving as ready beacons for Google searches.

A final differentiator with niche communities is that the community builder is the customer, NOT the consumer. This changes some of the assumptions about who owns the customer, who is the defining brand, whose domain the consumers run within, and where the breadcrumbs lead to when the consumer clicks.

So, for example, while the breadth and depth of services like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace are phenomenal, ultimately they want to own the customer, shape the branded experience and control the user flows.

As often as not, I believe that brands will want to maintain a direct relationship with their customers, they will want to retain control of their customer lists, have services that more seamlessly integrate with their domain, their website and their marketing initiatives.

The good news is that this is not an either/or proposition. My expectation is that through good platforms, creating rich, brand-friendly online experiences will become as pluggable and fast as signing up for an RSS feed.

This is not future-speak. There are recurring business processes, workflows, user experiences that if not fully formed, are actively forming. For example, Disney recently debuted a service targeted at virtualizing PR junkets tied to new DVD releases. The service, which used off-the-shelf technology, went from whiteboard to piloted service in under a month - and at a fraction of the cost of proprietary alternatives. The service has a special interface for members of the media, another for the distributor of the DVD, and still another from the creative talent behind the DVD.