Gartner, getting ready for its annual Expo, posts a tidbit from their research:  “By 2010, more than 60 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies with a Web site will connect to or host some form of online community that can be utilized for customer relationship purposes. ” (found via Tweet from one of my clients).

Consider (another “C” word?) how this interaction with and among customers might change the nature of work.  It depends, of course, on the way that the online community for customers is structured, and especially how it is managed. The Gartner press release goes on to say, that “by 2010, more than 50 percent of companies that have established an online community will fail to establish mutual purpose, ultimately eroding customer and company values.”

Purpose, structure, style and value are the four facets of networks that I describe in Net Work. To create a successful intentional network requires attention to a distinct set of elements in each of these facets.  One of the elements of structure is membership: defining exactly who the members are, what the criteria are, and how the purpose of the network creates value for all participants. Within the elements of style are openness and trust.  Do the criteria for membership adequately reflect the needs of the customer audience? Do C-level customer audiences need different assurances of trust than broader consumer audiences? Of course they do.

Thinking of C-level audiences put me in mind of  a different kind of community, INmobile. This is not precisely a customer community, but a protected space for executives in the wireless and telecommunications companies that is supported by  IdealWave, a recruitment firm specializing in these industries. I met CEO of IdealWave, Matthew Corbett,  last Spring on a webinar, and was able to connect with him in person easily as his office is just a few miles from my home. INmobile membership is strictly limited and controlled. All the members trust this environment and are able to have secure dialogue about events, to ask and answer questions, and to develop rapport without being in a public environment.  The community’s has grown to over 2,000 members since its inception just two years ago.

For a customer community to  develop and maintain a strong community of interaction at this level would, I think, need to be just as careful in selecting both which customers to include as well as what internal managers and senior staff to allow access to the community. There is so much promise in creating the conditions for ideas to emerge as customers bounce off each other, that it should be a no brainer for companies to want to look at designing the best possible interaction experience, starting small and letting customers apply and be admitted based on a select set of criteria.

Once customers are online and communicating with each other, there is no going back. Customers are part of the community, and work as we know it will change.