Recently, I’ve been working with Agent Wildfire President Sean Moffitt on a deep dive into the role of the brand community manager.  Companies that have created successful online communities, such as Harley Davidson, Dell, Intuit and Lululemon have done so in very unique ways, creating models that can be difficult for other companies to replicate.

If you’re wondering where online brand communities are going, a recent study from Gartner predicted two trends about the future of communities:  60% of Fortune 100 companies will have communities by 2010 and more than 50% of these will fail to establish a common purpose with their members.  The high failure rate is attributable to many causes, not the least of which is difficulty in determining where a community should “live” within the corporate setting.  Should accountability lie within the marketing department?  Customer service?  Product development?  Moreover, how do you measure success of a community?  How do you add enough value to engage regular visitors and encourage them to create content?

Company-sponsored communities are such a new phenomenon that there’s very little in the way of historic analysis and insight, especially on the quantitative side.  For this reason, nGenera and Agent Wildfire have created a survey to collect data from top company-sponsored communities.

Want to contribute to the study and be privy to the results?  If you have experience with a brand community, you’re invited to participate in the 2009 Brand Communities Survey.  The topics of the survey are:   the basics, focus and objectives, audience and outreach, incentives, rules, tools and platforms, staffing, metrics and ROI and overall advice, covering 55 key questions we always wanted to ask but never had the time.   All respondents will receive a topline version of the results once the responses have all been reviewed.