Online Communities and Their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril

Well INCREDIBLE SURVEY –> ready it

I will try to summarize later on

Working with online communities has long been touted as a great way for a company
to save money in its marketing, support, sales, and even product development. But for
most companies, the diversity of communities online, and the challenge of learning
how to work with them, is daunting. Most companies don’t understand how online
communities work, how they make a difference, and how to engage with them.
Among the companies that have tried to work with communities online, many have
found that they conversation is dominated by extreme enthusiasts rather than
average users, and have concluded that online community is a distraction from their
real customers.
That turns out to be a very dangerous mistake.
Rubicon Consulting’s web practice team recently conducted a broad survey of US web
users to understand better how people in the US use the web, with a special focus on
web community and its effect on consumers. Key findings of that survey, and its
implications for companies, include:

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http://rubiconconsulting.com/downloads/whitepapers/Rubicon-web-community.pdf