The Medium-Term Future for MROCs?

In a comment by @prazhari to one of my recent posts, Praz asked about the future of MROCs and about the difference between MROCs and other communities. Well here is my bash at an answer.

At the moment, online research communities (or MROC if you are a fan of initials) are very useful because they are providing something which cannot be readily obtained from other sources. However, when true, large-scale brand communities appear, I suspect that some online research communities could well be subsumed into brand communities.

However, I doubt that most brands will be able to create big enough communities to be able to do without online research communities (or some yet to be invented derivative of MROCs). The reason for that is due to most customers not caring that much about the many, many brands they buy.

For example, in a typical year I fly with about ten different airlines, use about six different rail companies, buy petrol (gas) from about ten brands of retailer, shop at four brands of grocer. In addition I buy many brands of drink, food, clothes, etc. I go to various entertainment destinations, from cinemas to holiday locations, and I am a member of professional, sporting, and political organisations. If I were to join and take part in online communities for all of these brands and activities I would never be able to leave the computer!

An online research community can be configured for any product or service. Finding 500 people to take a real interest in something, anything, can be achieved. But for most brands and services large-scale active communities are not a practical reality.

My own vision, for most brands and services is that they will create large databases of their customers and they will use this to follow people in the broader world of social media. Most of these databases will have some community aspects, and they will deal people in an increasingly intuitive way.

A few organisations will have very large communities, which they will use for marketing, NPD, market research etc. However, most will probably need to have targeted communities, representing a small percentage of their customers when they need a high level of activity. For the foreseeable future, when most brands or organisations need a community to work hard with them to help explore and co-create the future they will need to create a specific community, and incentivise it in some way (i.e. some combination of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards).

I do think that many MROCs will become broader, and incorporate other activities, such as affinity and word of mouth marketing, but I think they will be around for the mid-term (i.e. five years).

My question to you is "How many communities do you think the average citizen will be a member of in the future?"

Comments

[Ray Poynter]

Hi Praz, you are one of the most active people I know in terms of social media, so for most people 10 is likely to be the upper limit, with many people struggling with 1 or 2.

[Prazhari]

Hi Ray,

Thank you for the incisive response, certainly helps put a few things in to perspective in differentiating between the two...

As for the question "How many communities do you think the average citizen will be a member of in the future?" , to be honest , to be honest I'd never quite thought about it like that, but if there were an community for every brand/product out there, followed on by sub-brands and sub-niches then the sky's the limit.

The question of attention does come to my mind, ideally how many communities can a member be a part of (including writing actively on blogs) and maintain it on-going and doing it justice? Guess it would really depend on the brand. I contribute to 11 (some actively, some randomly) at the moment overall which has increased over a period of time and feel that's the right amount, however in saying that, if a community came out which really took my interest I'm sure i'd find time to fit it in.

Thanks again Ray,

Praz