VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: THE NEW PUBLIC OBJECTIVE

Technological changes often bring new terms of use that often fall into linguistic contradiction with the terms used in traditional technologies. These contradictions must be clarified so that they do not become an obstacle in the implementation of the new solutions. This is the case of the term audience.

Audience in the traditional technologies of diffusion of messages represented by mass media like radio, television and press refers to a public that receives the message of a passive way, without being able to express an opinion or critic to the sender by the content of the message. This form of use of the term audience fits perfectly into the linguistic definition of the term ⁽¹⁾. But what about the new technologies of message diffusion such as social network web platforms?

In digital social networks users dynamically exchange the roles of sender and receiver of messages, talking about the content message. In this context, the term audience is contradictory, being virtual communities the term that really describes the characteristics of the public that interacts or talks about a particular topic.

Thus, it is necessary to have a clear definition of virtual communities. The revision of several articles and documents allows me to propose the following definition:

It is a group of actors (people or organizations) that have an intensity of conversations between them that is greater than the intensity of conversations that they have with the rest of the actors of the social network. The intensity (low, intermediate or high) will depend on the common interests (hobbies, goals, projects, lifestyles, etc.) that exist between the actors, regardless of whether they belong to a formal or informal network structure

This clarification is important, because the correct identification of virtual communities is a vital element for the implementation of a digital communication plan that is part of a digital marketing strategy, since it will allow the design of precise message contents that seek to promote the achievement of strategic objectives such as: increase the demand for products and/or services (commercial marketing), increase the social benefits of a location (social marketing), increase the voters of a candidate (political marketing), etc.

In this way, through the digital communication plan, the message will be placed in the virtual community and actions will be carried out that will encourage conversations around this message, which will generate feedback that will be useful to evaluate and control the performance of the strategy of digital marketing.

Likewise, it will be of great value for the digital communication plan to know how these virtual communities are grouped (polarized-unified, fragmented-grouped or diffusion-support), since with this information one can have a clearer idea of the segments that compose the target.

Identifying the common interests underlying virtual communities as well as types of communities corresponds to an organizational process called social listening. In future blogs I will comment on some of the works I have developed in this topic using social network analysis.

Leopoldo Martínez D.

Links:

 ⁽¹⁾ http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definition/audience