Online Communities Benchmark Report

Resource Overview

In a September 2014 study sponsored by DNN, Demand Metric conducted a survey to identify the current state of adoption, goals, benefits, maturity, size and revenue influence of branded, online communities.

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Introduction

For any company or brand, improving customer engagement is highly desirable. The fruits of greater customer engagement include higher customer satisfaction, more customer advocacy, greater revenue and higher profit. Every firm wants these things that better customer engagement can provide – this much is clear. What isn’t always very clear or easy is how to best generate better customer engagement.

Online communities have emerged as a practical approach for nurturing, encouraging and enabling customer engagement. An online community is an online social network of individuals who interact with one another to pursue common goals and/or interests. Conceptually, an online community seems like an ideal mechanism for achieving higher customer engagement and the benefits thereof. In reality, are online communities delivering the hoped-for customer engagement benefits?

In a study sponsored by DNN, Demand Metric conducted a survey to find out if branded, online communities are delivering real customer engagement benefits. The study was conceived to understand how prevalent branded, online communities are and how they are performing.

The goal of this study was to identify the current state of adoption, goals, benefits, maturity, size and revenue influence of branded, online communities. With these insights, Demand Metric can provide benchmark data to help modern marketing organizations better leverage online communities.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Executive Summary
  3. Prevalence of Online Communities
  4. Goals & Benefits of Communities
  5. Online Community Maturity: Metrics
  6. Online Community Maturity: Tenure
  7. Online Community Maturity: Engagement
  8. Community Maturity: Revenue Influence
  9. Analyst Bottom Line
  10. Acknowledgements

  11. About DNN Software
  12. About Demand Metric
  13. Appendix - Survey Background

 

Research Methodology

The Online Communities Benchmark Study survey was administered online during the period of August 28, 2014 through September 15, 2014. During this period, 173 responses were collected, 121 of which were complete enough for inclusion in the analysis. The data was analyzed using SPSS to ensure the statistical validity of the findings. The representativeness of these results depends on the similarity of the sample to environments in which this survey data is used for comparison or guidance.