The following blog posts are being posted live from the Community Conference 2009 (#comcon2009) in Copenhagen. Please excuse spelling mistakes. Follow the conference live on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/seismonaut and via the tag #comcon2009.

Lois Kelly
Why Communities are Forever Changing the Business Landscape

Greatest challenges for communities
Getting people to the community
Getting people to engage and participate

What a Community Needs
Purpose
Deeply felt / Widely felt issue
Help and get help: People you trust
Danes don’t trust ads, they trust people.

Value og communities
Insights
Ideas
Loyalty
Market thought leadership
Amplifying word of mouth

Unexpected value of communities
Large amounts of ideas and insights
Higher sale pr. community member, $1200 vs. $500
Customers are creating their own marketing
In some respects replacing PR

Use your customers as the center of the community ideas, not your product. Don’t make a community about stamplers and paper, if you are an office supplier.

Networks are not channels, the ”bee hive” at IBM
People connect to people they otherwise wouldn’t
Campaigning – people pitch ideas in the network
Climbing – people can ”get ahead” faster via the network, because people can see what you do without you having to show them.

Measuring communities is now different than any other business metric
First, decide why you are doing it – why do you want a community. Is it to get new ideas, reduce support load? Design you community for that purpose, and you will be able to see if it’s working.
Be aware that communities are a lot of work. You need to be aware that you will not get ”easy” results, it takes a much work as any other effort. So, as Lois says: ”Is the juice worth the squeeze?”.
Do you need more ”social”, and not a community? Like Amazon review system.

Learn from unions
Organize around what people really want to change / care about
Uncover how people FEEL about the issues
Get people engaged via anger, hope, action…
Keep people motivated be aknowledging them and their efforts.