Finding the "right" community to promote your brand in.

With millions of niche focused blogs, forums, social networks, review sites and other social communities, it not hard to find places willing to take your money and bring you into the fold. But just because they'll let you show your name doesn't mean you want to... whether the too negative, too off topic, just too anti-business, or just too small, with limited resources and budget, finding the right community to invest in is crucial to making an impact and hitting your goals. So, just what should you look for in a community?

1. What's the size? Put simply, size does matter but not always how you think.

When you're looking at communities you want to be sure there's enough people to bring you traffic and grow but that doesn't necessarily mean the biggest is the best. Community sites often get wrapped up in metrics that don't mean much- the number of members who register on a forum is interesting but if it's over a 10 year period the site could be all but dead and boast a huge total. Activity counts.

Even traffic doesn't mean as much on a community site as it may on a typical content site. What you need to know is how the traffic numbers fall as they relate to the various segments - are there 5,000 people coming to the site so often they generate 500,000 pageviews or is it 250,000 people generating them? Are the visitors 75% members or 25% members? You may be wondering why this matters, after all, an eyeball is an eyeball but think about it: when you're trying to integrate into a social site and not just place a banner, you need to know if the people who come there stay around long enough to use your viral campaign or if they just read two items and bail. The more interactive your campaign is, the more important it is to have a community that gets people to stick around long enough to see & use it. Engagement counts.

Finally consider how the traffic follows in a site and put that in context with your campaign. You may find great engagement and activity rates on the forums but if your brand is limited by corporate dogma or perhaps government regulation, getting involved in the articles section of the same site might be a complete waste of time. Communities are businesses too and often try to grow their traffic and activity by adding features but not all of these catch on. To make matters even more confusing, a lot of communities will suggest sponsoring or leading a section of their site (i.e. a particular forum topic, application, etc...) but not factor in the actual use of the tool - to them it's where your brand belongs but to you, being on the new part of the site with no adoption isn't that useful. Adoption matters.

2. What's the focus? As communities grow some stay right on focus while others drift.

The more members these sites get the more easily they can come "off track". User to user communities are especially subject to this as people form relationships and will naturally want to discuss more than just the main site topic. As discussions drift away from the theme of the site, the audience may widen out of the exact focus, there may be less interest in the main topic and to your brand may also have less appeal to the user base.

This isn't to say you can't have success in a community with a more generalized focus but rather than you have to weigh the benefits and understand just how far down the slope things are as this will dictate your marketing position. If you're trying to build discussion or activity around a focused niche and buying banners or sponsoring content, you'll want to target areas (forums, categories, topics) that have higher relevancy as opposed to doing run of site buys. On the other hand, if you just want to be offering a social interaction to get advocates, discussion and increase awareness, it may be fine to remain broad on a broader forum with higher traffic stats that is qualified but not always on-point. Ultimately the campaign you run and how it succeeds will be dependent on how well the community stays on topic - the more focused, the more direct response you can draw and the higher the correlation input will be to that of your true advocates while looser communities will be better for getting brand impressions to a larger audience and with more frequency.

3. What's the tolerance to companies?

Often times community owners will make the decision to accept commercial players either directly through involvement or advertising long after launching. This shift occurs because traffic wasn't enough to attract companies or because a shift in perception/ revenue need. However, just because the bloggers/ administrators are on board doesn't mean the users will be [and vice-versa]. Before you take any role in a community, paid or just participant you need to gauge how the audience will react both to commercial interests if there have been none in the past and to your specific brand.

This can be especially difficult for strong brands where we're inclined to think only the best of ourselves and not think about the more viral perceptions people may have. Since communities are often made from superusers and advocates, any negatives can be enhanced and if planned poorly, a viral campaign or just being involved in a community can turn into wide bashing. This is of course highly dependent on how the community treats organizations both from a membership and administrative point - ideally the site should be tolerant to companies and also take a stance to help insure there is not flagrant "attacks" taking place. You want a community that you can be involved with, not one that is going to run you off just like every other company.

However, communities are ultimately about their membership so don't insist on pulling bad discussions, that just furthers the issue, if there is an issue with your brand, regardless of the fault you have to be willing to see criticism and ideally to respond to it with an authoritative manner in near real time using real language (and not after marketing, pr and legal have all spent 2 weeks reviewing it).

If your brand doesn't have much in the way of negative points for discussion you'll still want to be sure the site isn't simply ripping into every company it sees. Certain communities are more anti-corporate than others and while this can often be worked on, you have to be willing to accept it if this is the case and will want to insure the site administrators are on your side to insure the stage is being set to remain positive and not just attack any name that shows up.

4. Are you the first company on board or the last?

Similar to item #3, it's important to understand how many other companies have been involved with the community in any capacity. This isn't just a matter or picking up on whether or not users will bash a corporate presence but also how many names you're playing with and how much learning there's been on past integrations.

If you're the first company on board you get a great chance to set the stage, push the envelope and try things out, often at a great cost. However, there's also no learnings to go off of, no examples of flops or successes to go with. Luckily there are lots of ideas from around the internet to pick up on already, just realize you'll have to be quicker to react and more creative.

If you're not the first company and especially if there's other players on the site you'll need to consider their role and overlap. It's rare to find a thriving community without competing advertisers these days but since you're looking to go beyond just banners, the question isn't how many banners are on the site but rather how many voices are. The more voices the more distraction and again the more creative your campaign has to be. Ideal communities are not necessarily devoid of companies - in fact having a few other players can help you as the site comes off as more serious.

5. Are they selling you a "social" banner or a "social" presence?

The final item I'll touch on in this post is the nature of your involvement. In the early days of "social", companies either bought ads or started their own site. These days' many brands are much more receptive to taking greater roles in companies but sometimes communities won't allow it, or the company isn't ready for it.

Thus there's a twofold requirement to this point; your brand has to understand its ability to react and insure there's enough resources to manage the level of involvement you agree on and you have to find a community that offers a suitable level of involvement. Many companies are still resistant on letting people in beyond an ad and while ad impressions are great, they're just ads and probably with an overly high number of impressions per visitor.

Since you're looking to getting social [you made it to point #5 so I think that's a safe assumption] you'll want to insure the site is welcoming to a deeper level of involvement than just ads, you'll need to find ways to participate. Ultimately companies that participate in communities get noticed and can create buzz which is exactly what the whole point is - a banner isn't enough and don't settle for just that unless it's because of your own limitations.

So there you have it - 5 important things to look at when evaluating a community to get involved in. Of course there's a lot more to it and more important than any specific function of the community is how your campaign its self is built. Even the right community won't give you much traction if all you want to do is place banners and walk away...

For more on ways to get integrated into different communities check out this post.