"Online Communities offer unparalleled opportunities to enhance your business."

- Blue Barn Interactive.
Community-enable your e-business

What do business organizations gain by adding "community" features to their web sites?

Extranet and intranet communities have different purposes. Extranet communities exist to strengthen relationships with customers or trade partners. Intranet communities seek to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing among employees. By engaging customers and partners with netVillage interactive community tools - through use of public message boards, e-mail, chat rooms, polls, surveys, etc. - businesses can build stronger customer relationships, increase customer loyalty, tap market knowledge, and provide invaluable feedback.

Businesses are looking to add ‘community’ on their sites to:

  • Build stronger customer relationships - Online communities help companies create and maintain a two-way dialogue with their best customers. Companies can use community to understand and respond to their wants and needs on an ongoing basis.
  • Increase Customer Loyalty - Reports show that community members are more loyal to and remain customers of an e-business 50 percent longer than people who choose not to join these virtual collaborative marketplaces.
  • Tap Market knowledge - Community provides an important source of consumer feedback on products and services, allow examination of trends, and learn more about the behavior of customers. Forget about commissioning expensive marketing research, communities are an opportunity to engage a real live focus group.
  • Valuable Content - The postings to discussion groups, chat room conferences, feedback to management, and the data created by the routine use of community resources, all creates more value for members.
  • Viral Marketing - Online communities bring a company closer to loyal customers or partners who strongly identify with a product or service, putting their energy and enthusiasm to helping build a business faster.
  • Knowledge Sharing – community tools provide a cost-effective method for information sharing.
  • Realize Cost savings - Leveraging chat and discussion forum technology for technical support can result in significant manpower cost savings.
  • Cost Effective Content Strategy - Communities will generate its own relevant and authentic content. Member-generated content includes such things as postings of text, images, and sounds by members, polls and ratings, and shared best practices.
  • Increase E-Commerce Revenue. CD-Now has found that return visitors buy 150 percent more product than first-time visitors. According to Forrester Research, members of a community are 36% more likely to buy than non-members.
  • Engage customers - Forty percent of visitors to a web site want to connect with other visitors to discuss the site’s content, services, and products, according to Jupiter Communications

Click here to view some research articles on how adding "community features" can enhance your e-business.

Research Report Offers Look at Economic Value Created by Online Communities

Creating Community Online
What Every CEO Needs to Know about Electronic Business

Virtual Communities Today