Think about your most valued customers. These are the people who love your brand, promote your products and generally want to share what makes you great with everyone they know.

Let’s say a group of these brand enthusiasts wanted to hold a party to celebrate your brand, or what it stands for. Let’s say they contacted you and said "Hey, we’d like to have a big party with a few thousand people who thing your company is just great. We’ll come up with the entertainment. We’ll promote it. We’ll get as many people as we can to attend." Would your response be "That’s great. Tell us how it goes."?

Or would you tell them they can have their party at your headquarters?

Would you give them some cool party favors and invites?

Would you do what you could to make sure it was easy for them to find as many other brand enthusiasts as possible?

If you’re an affinity brand (or if you want to be) you have brand enthusiasts. These are people who are passionate about what you do or the things you make. They appreciate the effect you’ve had on their lives.

These people make up your community—and trust me, in 2009, they’re online. That’s where they congregate, find each other and share their interests—including your brand.

Are you leaving them homeless? Are you saying, in effect, "We know you love us… but can’t you just love us from afar?"

Many companies hear the term "online community" and automatically think "website build." Sometimes that’s a good idea, and sometimes it’s not. That’s not what this post is about.

The point of this post is that if you don’t declare a place that is "home base" for your online community, you’re being a bad friend to the people who you should understand are your best friends. These are the people who are going to save your bacon as trust in traditional advertising and overall brand loyalty continues to plummet. At a minimum, you owe them acknowledgement, an open channel to communicate with you (within the bounds of respectful conversation). If you’re smart, you’ll go beyond that and provide them with the best possible place and resources to have their party on your behalf.

If you can’t justify the resources to set up and manage a Facebook Fan Page, or a Twitter profile, or a blog, or some kind of human-powered touchpoint, then you’d better be prepared to increase your advertising budget considerably. Because it’s going to take a lot of media-buy shouting to drown out your silence in response to their digital love notes.

When you hear the words “online community” do you immediately think of a branded social network?  A Ning network?  A Facebook Fan Page?

What about a discussion forum or message board?  Or a corporate blog?

Many times, businesses get locked into a certain model or mindset when it comes to thinking about online community sites.

The truth is, there are many different models for adding a collaborative, community-building element to your brand’s web presence.  It’s important to consider several different factors when deciding how to begin building your brand’s online community.

What’s your primary purpose for building community? Are you looking for a cost-effective customer support channel?  Then a message board might be the best fit.  Need a tool to educate consumers while providing them the opportunity for direct feedback? You might consider a corporate blog as a logical starting place, and use comments and user-profiles as a starting point for community-building.  Want to build brand passion? A branded social network might be the way to go, but you might also be surprised at the flexibility of options available.   Regardless of what you choose, if you’re completely clear about your purpose, you can be equally clear in defining success.

What are your restrictions and resources? Maybe in a perfect world, a message board would be the best option–but a message board could require an investment of time in moderating and responding that you can’t support, if it’s successful.  If you don’t have the budget for a major website build, then it might be worth considering starting out on Facebook.  Are you in the spirits industry? Then forget about Twitter–you’ll be subject to a DISCUS violation right off the bat because of the service’s inability to filter by legal purchase age.

When it comes to cultivating your brand’s online community of enthusiasts, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.  On the other hand, with enough thought and research, you’ll find that there’s almost always a solution that will fit out of the many options that are out there.

It’d be nice if companies approached online communities with a sense of excitement and possibility.  More often, the dominant emotion that comes across when first talking with decision-makers about engaging consumers online is fear.

It’s not that they don’t recognize the tremendous value of cultivating their brand enthusiasts into a thriving community of brand ambassadors.

It’s just that they remember high school.

Let’s be honest: where there are people, there will be jerks.  And where there are jerks, unpleasant things are going to be said.  In online communities, there is a name for people whose sole purpose in interacting online is to stir up trouble: trolls.

Per Wikipedia, a troll is:

“someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional or disciplinary response, or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”

One of the benefits of engaging consumers directly online through social media is that it opens up the opportunity to bring legitimate service issues to light and resolve them.  In that sense, negative comments about your brand have the potential to convert negative consumer attitudes into positive ones, when handled well.  ComcastCares is a perfect example of this.

That said, there are a certain number of people who you can’t make happy–because they’re not interested in being happy.

Some things to keep in mind when dealing with detractors in your online community:

• Respond, don’t react.  The point of trolling is to get a reaction from you and/or the rest of the community.  Respond calmly, point out the comment policy, and remind everyone to keep things civil (including your proponents, who can sometimes respond-in-kind in your defense).
• Give fair warning. As long as you let users know that unruly behavior will lead to an IP ban or moderation, the rest of the community will support your decision.  Your job is to protect the experience of the many who are benefitting from having a direct channel to your company.  The members respect that it’s your space and you have a responsibility to maintain its standards of behavior.
• Back up your talk. If you do warn someone that they’re skating on thin ice, don’t hesitate to use your authority if they don’t heed the warning.  Your loyalty should be to the community–and they’re not served by someone who’s agenda is to cause trouble.

Got any good Troll Tales that could be fodder for helpful discussion?  Chime in on the comments.