Hi all,   I am pretty new at Lithium community and I must say I already learned a lot via exploring lots of thoughtful discussions and best practices. So I am in the process of developing a community strategy and therefore I need a good arguments and story-line to support my strategy.   Within my community strategy documentation, I would like to answer following questions:   - Why you should invest in your own branded community? The intention here is to provide arguments regarding the added value of branded communities. Imagine, today, there are already very prominent public communities on Internet e.g. stackoverflow, kickstarter, motor-talk, etc. If as a company you have the idea of having a community with a similar objective, why don't you just join those instead of creating an own branded one? I did some research already and thanks to Lithium Community I have found following arguments:   - "Branded communities have a greater opportunity to create more loyalty and lifetime customer value than through social networks like Facebook or Twitter" - "Community adds a sense of belonging to a Web site. This can encourage repeat visits and more interest in the site as a whole" - "„Building own online communities means that you will be in control of the communication and relationship with your customers. Besides that, the data generated by your community will be just yours, and not available to your competitors." - "If the community is yours, you have control over the direction, look, feel, and even the revenue opportunities" - "„From a brand's perspective, communities allow users to develop deeper relationships with their users and site visitors, and since these communities reside on a brand's website or other owned "online property," companies with branded communities are able to manage and own data about their site visitors, and reap the SEO benefits that community content tends to provide. Even more, it allows engagement between users around a central and shared interest."   Do you maybe have more arguments that could be also used to answer this question?   Now more interesting part is coming 🙂   Let's say I am convinced to invest in an own branded community, how do I make sure that I attract the target audience, who is already participating in public communities, so that they come to my community?   I am still working on this part. I would appreciate if you have any material or ideas to answer this question. ... View more