How online communities have come of age … for catalogers

By Joe Dysart

“Several facilitators guide the conversation and help bridge the gap between customer and company,” Lerman says. That intimacy and the invitation-only factor can result in more members participating in ongoing discussions. “When members [of invitation-only communities] contribute, they participate at a high rate — an average of 3.9 contributions per week,” says Lerman, citing an in-house study of 66 online communities researched by Communispace.