Every great organization relies on the brand experience encountered by each community member. Traditionally, companies have utilized television, radio, and print advertising and one-to-one marketing as branding tools to create the core of their communities. The flaw with this logic is the fact that the branding tools themselves are as ephemeral and fleeting as the members' wants and needs.

Conventional advertising methods have only recently been relegated to the periphery of the community by emerging technologies. The IT Director is now subordinate to the Marketing Director as the sales, print, radio, and television marketing tools begin to revolve around the nucleus that is the Web site. Go figure. You have two experts on staff who must work together, but they can't seem to agree on anything. Many companies are actually experiencing the same dilemma with their advertising agencies.

While advertising firms are able to identify the solution to almost any marketing challenge for a client, they still grapple with managing Internet professionals. Agencies went from gobbling up Web design firms to spitting them back out once the relationship soured. The emergence of professional services firms with creative and Internet expertise threatens to fill a niche for the agencies and the clients they represent.

The technology has advanced to the point that the focus has moved from "How does it work?" to "How does it feel?" The Marketing Director and CIO are finally allowed to ask the question, "What is the user's experience?" The focus is less on the technology and more on the strategy behind the dollars being spent. It was never a good idea to implement an online community prior to devising a strategy for the experience.

The paradigm has shifted, and the new center of the organization's brand experience is the Web site community. The Web site community experience has the ability to transform interested onlookers into valuable customers, clients, and patrons. The ever-present Web site now serves as symbol and representative of the activity of every organization. This fact remains regardless of whether or not that organization has embraced Internet technology.

Figure 1. Paradigm Shift

During the second half of the twentieth century, communities were created around motivational speakers, thought leaders, and new business methodologies such as Six Sigma. Associations, networking events, and a multitude of "experts" have materialized with countless books written on experiential branding, but none that truly defines the centralized heart of a community experience.

A central figure or conceptual thought is the vital component of every healthy community experience. In every community there must exist a focus of attention that draws new members in and keeps current members captivated. This practice requires an ever-evolving central theme that continues to be explored and is forever filled with discovery.

Just as brands and signage have become a part of the contemporary Western landscape, the Internet too is a part of our lives in a way that we still cannot fathom. As a global consciousness we are educating ourselves in technology at breakneck speed. We are spending as much time learning what to do with the technology we have created as we are in understanding and developing it for future use. The value proposition of the Web is readily apparent, but the skills necessary to master this medium are still being discovered.

Regardless of how professionally and financially beneficial they may be, online communities are currently too complex and out of reach for many organizations. There are numerous books dedicated to defining both the online brand and intuitive interface design, but not one that approaches the cultivation of a sense of kinship through strategy and experience.

The fact that the community experience defines the brand experience has still not been explored as the means to encourage, empower, and nurture an audience.

Corporations and other large institutions have subscribed to enterprise-level programs to encourage this inclusive customer involvement and to support their employees. The news and entertainment media have chronicled each new technological model relentlessly without identifying the purpose of discovering a new community.

Yahoo!, Excite, and Netscape have all built portals attempting to define the solution to cultivating a unified community. Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and many others have created powerful enterprise portal software for empowering their customers, but their clients do not realize that the technology is less than half of the battle. In fact, the myriad turnkey products now available only serve to confuse the strategy for most executives.

The advantages that the World Wide Web provides for organizations seeking to increase their client recruitment are the abilities to track community involvement and to distribute desired content to their community members. These advantages are certainly not a revelation to those organizations with millions of dollars devoted to the research and development of technologies and strategies that can accomplish these tasks for them, but for many mid-sized organizations the solution to achieving control over their online community is still out of reach.

These companies are unable to effectively represent their brand on the Internet due to a lack of understanding of the technologies and the absence of a comprehensive strategy for defining roles and creating profiles of their community members.

The answer to managing these complex brand experience issues is to find individuals who possess creative marketing prowess coupled with skills, understanding, and technological capabilities that provide a breadth of knowledge and applicable experience. Proven and applied community-building strategy is just as important as the ability to focus on future technological strategies and implementations.