The Growing Potential of Online communities

The cutting edge in technology has enabled cross-cultural communications with online communities gaining prevalence among the masses. The mediums which have been exploited to attract the online users are forums, blogs, podcasts, message boards, wikis and vlogs. The social networking sites which have promoted the growth of online communities and have gained the utmost attention are Orkut, MySpace and Facebook apart from the other social media clubs like SEMPO and DFWIMA. This has obviously led to the advantage of marketing experts to reap revenues out of the online conversions by adopting a definite strategy on one hand while on the other hand the increasing level of interaction between the users for knowledge, information sharing and to seek entertainment. The segment inherently attached to these networking sites is the today’s generation youngsters who share opinions and their experiences by building up the online community. No doubt that the use of words in a spoken form has been translated into a written textual form and these texts have occupied space in the online communities. Building an online community requires tools and one of the tools which has replaced the traditional tools of communities is the latest Web 2.0 application which is considered as the most vibrant and potent tool today to build an online community. While building up the online community, extremely fine methods are taken into account in order to increase the participation of these community members. Also called as e-community or virtual community, the online community offers the following benefits: · Reduced costs of conducting meetings and other costs such as print materials to be sent as letters. · Enables faster reach across the wide sections of society. · Enables a larger customer base and also generates leads in the form of new target audience on a daily basis. · Manifests the database of the participants or members on an immediate and regular basis and accessibility of these centralized data to all the members. One starts wondering why this kind of community has not been utilized by the NGOs who can work out innumerable solutions to reach the underprivileged and the downtrodden. When there are communities from educationists to the musicians and the music lovers across multiple societies, the growth should been much faster. The users on the online communities create and share videos, seek web boards to have multiplayer online games, but all these are just restricted to entertainment and knowledge sharing uptil now.

Had this been for the betterment of society by the online groups through creating fund-raisers, it would have worked wonders. There are some religious groups who have created the social communities for their own interests around the world but they have not explored or realized the effectiveness of the online communities. No doubt, the online communities have put off the technical barriers which was there before 1990. When these communities were being built up, expertise was required and the interest also needed to be generated among the ethnic groups. Never did anybody imagine that online community will grow up to such an extent that even the not so geeks can make use of it. AOL and Yahoo were the sites which gave rise to the groups formed under the online community with much less technical know-how. Most of the IT pro organizations have developed their communities to facilitate the wide gamut of knowledge sharing and enable success in business. The online users can also have an access to the latest newsletters, latest product updates, new technology by participating on a shared platform. One can seek professional as well as personal growth by becoming a member of online community. What more, you can talk, create, blog, listen to music and play by actively participating in these online communities. From strangers to friends every thing has been possible. The marketers have realized the importance and are making all efforts to reap the rewards on a commercial basis. Yahoo who created a special portal for the fandom of brands suggests the growing potential of these communities. These online communities have also brought relationship marketing to the fore.

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Reduced cost, faster reach, customer base, centralized data.,

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