Transcript excerpt of a talk by Ricardo Molina arguing that the primary return on investment (ROI) from online communities is attention. He contrasts top-of-funnel (broad, awareness-focused) and bottom-of-funnel (niche, customer/event-focused) communities, and emphasizes that attention—access to engaged, often senior individuals—is more valuable than transactional metrics like raw reach or sponsorship counts.
Chapters
The return on investment of an online community requires a change of mindset because. And then there are two communities. Top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, right, where you have more awareness, numbers tend to be bigger, tends to be more broadcasty, sharing a lot of content. Bottom of the funnel, probably customer communities or in the context of an event industry, people that have attended an event and they will be a bit more niche depending on the size of the event generally. But the biggest pain that every leader right now and every marketeer is facing today is attention. Everyone complains, there's a lot of noise. So the biggest return on investment an online community can provide and you highlighted that, is attention. You're going to have attention of a CEO of a very senior individual that is probably a member of this community of 50, that is a member of this community of 200. But you've got their attention because they're interested, they're asking questions and they know that they're going to get the answer to those questions. So for me, when I kind of talk to other individuals that, when I'm, when I'm kind of talking about, you know, the value of communities is attention, that's the return on investment. To me, it amazes me like how, how much access, I mean being a member of some communities and being a vendor in one of those communities, and thankfully I'm welcome these communities because I understand the value of that attention, of that participation and that leadership. And I think that is an element that I wanted to highlight is the return on investment is not the transactional element. Okay, you, Mr. Sponsor, you're going to be a member of this community and I can get you X number of people is more. I can get you the attention or you can get the attention of certain individuals in here that wouldn't give you your attention any other way.
