For the Kasparov/Deep Blue rematch site, IBM tapped Electric Minds to host its global conferencing center, and the site drew more than a million viewers in one weekend - proof that "community," in some sense, pays. In the same spirit of corporate shill-cum-town-hall, Citibank announced Tuesday an unusual two-year agreement with "guided" index The Mining Company to develop extensive customer communities based on the site's "people-powered" templates.
"Citibank is expanding its bank lobby to be huge," says Mining Company founder Scott Kurnit. "They're taking our 500 [Web] guides and having them stand behind the teller window with the teller." Though the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Citibank scores immediate brain capital about the Web (and "preferred advertiser" positions at the Mining Company), while Kurnit's company neatly remakes itself into a full-service "tool" company in one fell swoop.
For the project, Citibank will radically refashion its site, which is currently a pared-down brochure. In addition to an array of bulletin boards, chats, and newsletters, the site will use "guides" - modeled after the Mining Company site hosts - who will oversee specific financial subject areas like mortgages, credit cards, or pension plans. At each "customer community" (an expression trademarked by Citibank), the guides will answer questions, steer users to information, write columns, and moderate chats.
Though Citibank is sponsoring the site, Kurnit is looking for a more general customer as his target audience. "I don't suspect people will talk about Citibank mortgages," he says. "I expect people to ask questions to the Citibank mortgage guide."
Citibank is certainly edging into uncharted waters as it opens itself up to the Web community, says spokeswoman Nina Das. "This is a brand-new concept of customers talking to customers," she says. "But Citibank is into relationships." For the launch, likely to take six months, Citibank employees will be trained as "guides" through a three-week course to learn HTML and community-building.
As Kurnit describes it, the new site will force Citibank into honesty in the "unbridled, unedited" atmosphere of the Web. "If you don't tell your customers [the truth], they'll find it anyway, and they'll be annoyed with you for not telling them," says Kurnit. "In this information economy ... well-informed customers are good customers."
Citibank's cozying up for community signals a change in the corporate approach to the Web, says Forrester analyst Emily Green. "Service companies are starting to grasp the intimacy aspects of the Web," she says. "With the size of the investments that they make online, [banks] need to make sure people stick around."
Much of the new corporate strategy follows from the advice of John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong in their book, Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities, which argues that businesses need to seed online communities to succeed online.
But with an organizing principle based around the personalities of "guides" and the rowdiness of "community," it will be difficult to maintain corporate propriety, says Omar Wasow from local BBS and Web shop New York Online. "The most valuable thing on the Net is a filter," says Wasow, "Some of the [guides] will be great, but others will be terrible. It will be very hard to maintain a consistency of product."
