Z/Yen has quite a business managing a diverse set of online communities, or CommunityZ as we term them. We have the Z/Yen business community with its SpecialiZm group looking out for interim management opportunities, ExtZy community playing our country news prediction market, Long Finance community discussing “when would we know our financial system is working”, and the Insenter community for wholesale insurers. A small confession to members of these free-to-join communities, you’ve been ‘guinea pigs’ for us as we’ve tested ideas such as trivia games, avatars for navigating complex datasets, or carbon cost calculators. Over the years we’ve held monthly meetings so the community managers, community organisers, and technical support can swap metrics and ideas. From all this, we’ve developed quite a bit of thinking on the importance of building strong business-to-business communities as the core of effective marketing and sales. We were delighted to have a conscientious intern, James Franklin of Gresham College, work with us during 2013 on how would you measure the value of such communities. James brought a wealth of social media experience from his time at Gresham.

After several months of research, James Franklin, Michael Mainelli and Robert Pay published their work, "Measuring the Value of Online Communities", in the Journal of Business Strategy, Volume 35, Number 1, Emerald Group Publishing Limited (January 2014). One of the interesting points in the study was the essential nature of debit and credit inherent in a functioning community. A community can be understood as a network of indebtedness, member-to-member, member-to-owner and owner-to-member. Each member will be indebted to the owner for the space in which to connect with others, and they will enter into the community on the assumption that the other members will be worth their time and effort and that those other members also enter into the community in the same spirit. This suggests the potential relevance of online currencies; if an online community is built on trust in the same way as financial exchanges, then should it not therefore be able to support its own currency? Perhaps the possibility of floating an online currency could be the ultimate test of the vibrancy of communities of a certain size. This may help explain Z/Yen’s interest in AltCoins over the past several years. A discussion to continue online, perhaps in Long Finance’s Eternal Coin discussion group!