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“Community as a function of business and a function of practice has been a long time coming. It’s just maturing. You need the technology to enable these things. The people are critical of course, but you need the technology to work really well.”
That was Mike Rizzo, founder of the MO Pros community, in the first part of this two-part series on the significance of community marketing for brands. I set out to speak to two people from very different backgrounds, each of whom has created a technology to enable community — very different offerings representing very different perspectives.
Online networks are actually valuable
“A lot of people feel isolated and wonder why they can’t find someone that gets them – and you can find that online in the right places,” said Melanie Aronson, founder and CEO of Panion, a community management platform. Aronson is far from a typical tech CEO. She continues to work as a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, she has master’s and post-master’s degrees in the visual arts and a bachelor’s degree in social anthropology.
“I wrote my thesis when I was at Columbia on couch-surfing — one of the first communities where people were using online to meet offline. It was fascinating to me. I couch-surfed in 15 to 20 different countries by myself. I was inspired by those experiences and the quality of the connections I made around the world.” Aronson was speaking about in-person connections; Panion was originally focused on bringing people together
Read more here: https://martech.org/how-technology-is-enabling-community-marketing/
