Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: communities

  • Building business communities

    Building business communities

    Industrial designers and engineers are probably the last thing most of us think of when discussing online communities.

    Last week two very different events illustrated just how successful businesses benefit from building communities around their products and services.

    Over lunch at a nice restaurant overlooking Sydney Harbour Dassault Systemes launched their their latest Solidworks 3D design software where they described the two million members of their global user community as being key competitive advantage in the industrial design market.

    In the business sector, having that ecosystem of users is the key success as shown by businesses ranging from AutoCAD to Photoshop. Almost every industry has some software package that dominates the sector because ‘everyone uses it’.

    Building social media communities

    At the other end of the scale earlier in the day PayPal Australia launched their latest Driving Business Online campaign showcasing online commerce tools for the small to medium business sector.

    One of the companies they profiled was Brisbane fashion company Black Milk Clothing, a Brisbane based business that has grown from a startup to employing 150 staff in four years entirely through its 560,000 strong Facebook community and 655,000 Instagram followers.

    While there’s risks with relying on social media platforms as a primary marketing channel, Black Milk is a good example of what a retail business can do with building an online community.

    Older examples

    None of this is really new, Apple are probably the best example of a tech community with millions of adoring fans prepared to queue around the block for the latest iPhone.

    Microsoft’s continued profitability despite being in a declining market comes from its army of developers, system admins and IT support services who are deeply committed to the company’s products.

    At it’s most basic, every business needs a core of dedicated customers, committed staff and enthusiastic evangelists — with today’s tools companies like Black Milk are able to build a global brand.

    Not every business can build a global brand out of their communities of enthusiastic customers and dedicated employees but the goodwill in those groups are quite possibly the biggest asset any organisation has.

    With today’s online collaborative tools and social media services there’s no excuse for a business not be nurturing and growing their communities.

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  • Beer and 3D printing lead a Belgian town into the future

    Beer and 3D printing lead a Belgian town into the future

    While many cities and states are fighting to subsidise declining businesses others are becoming hubs of future industries. The story of Leuven and 3D printing is one of the latter.

    A great article and accompanying presentation from Reuters illustrates some of the possibilities with 3D printing technologies.

    Most of the article revolves around the Belgian company Materialise whose CEO, Wilfried Vancraen, has been a pioneer in 3D printing.

    An interesting upshot of Materialise’s development is how the company’s hometown, Leuven, is promoted by the firm as the ‘world capital of beer and 3D printing.’

    Belgian town Leuven is promoted as the beer and 3D printing capital

    Calling yourself the ‘World Capital of Beer’ is a big – and one suspects risky – call in Belgium so it’s not surprising that the town itself doesn’t use the tagline.

    Being the world capital of 3D printing though does have some allure of Leuven being able to build itself into one of the world’s hub for the new technology.

    Those hubs are a feature of every industrial revolution – whether it’s Silicon Valley and the manufacturing centres of South East China today or the English ironworking and cotton milling hubs of the 18th Century.

    For governments looking at attracting job creating industries, instead of desperately trying to attract the old industries of the 20th Century it might be worthwhile to consider what the community has to offer the business leaders of this millennium.

    Leuven may or may not become one of the world hubs of 3D printing, but at least the city has a chance – those bidding for car factories, movie productions or prisons are destined to decline even if their bids succeed.

    Beer pouring image courtesy of dyet and sxc.hu

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  • Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

    Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

    As US bookseller Barnes and Noble shrinks its store network, Mark Athitakis has a tribute to the once ubiquitous chain in The New Republic.

    Barnes and Noble was never popular among US independent booksellers because of the perception, probably true, that the chain drove locally owned stores out of business.

    What it offered though was a safe, comfortable place for booklovers to gather in suburban shopping malls. As Mark points out, it created a community.

    Its stores were designed to keep people parked for a while, for children’s story time, for coffee klatches, for sitting around and browsing. That was a business decision—more time spent in the store, more money spent when you left it—but it had a cultural effect. It brought literary culture to pockets of the country that lacked them.

    In recent years that community moved to coffee shops, in the United States B&N’s role was taken by Starbucks, at the same time our reading habits changed and the business of selling books and magazines became tougher.

    Now that community is changing again, as the online societies like blogs, Facebook and Twitter become important, the coffee shops have responded with free wi-fi which is a perfect example of how the online and offline world come together.

    That need to create communities, either physically or online, is a driving human urge.

    Online that role is being catered to with social media platforms and sites like food, mommy or tech blogs where like minded people can gather.

    Down at the mall, Barnes and Noble catered for that need in the 1980s and Starbucks in the 1990s. What will follow them may be the next big success in the retail or hospitality industry.

    Image courtesy of Brenda76 on SXC

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