In fact I think that communities are to Internet what bees are to hives: they are essential to it and inseparable from it. They indeed ensure Internet’s constant supply, renewal and evolution.Online communities create an ecosystem useful to society, because created by and for it. The commitment of individuals to communities is not a new phenomenon. It’s actually a very old habit,  but never in the History of Man have communities ever been given such powers; thanks to the Internet and globalization their range of influence is now the world, and they can communicate with it almost as rapidly as a click on a mouse, since broadband Internet access has now become mainstream in developped countries.

Internet has enabled communities of consumers to somehow take over an entire side of our consumer society. As written in the infamous Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, the rise of the Internet has put the power into consumers hands, and more specifically their conversations, they wrote: “Markets are conversations”. This book explained that since the rise of Internet, offer and demand was increasingly going to be determined  by online consumers conversations. Just remember that about 15 years ago, the only free sources of information about products and services available to consumers were mostly corporate:  advertising, and retailers catalogues ! That’s about it! Has objectivity ever existed before the Internet came up? One thing I know for sure, is that communities sites have enabled consumers to get collectively much smarter through the sharing of product experiences on online forums and consumers review sites (ie. epinion.com, ciao.com etc).

Consumers know they get a better help from each other than from companies. Since then, the influence of public relations, marketing and advertising  has dramatically decreased. 10 years after the Cluetrain Manisfesto had been written, figures show the authors were right: 80% of consumers read online reviews, 60% declare trusting them, while only 16 to 30% of consumers trust information pushed by companies (source: Forrester research).

Forrester Research 2009

Within 10 years, companies have lost most of their influence over consumers, and networked consumers conversations (ie. forums, reviews) are now indispensable to hundreds of millions of shoppers worldwide, for both online and offline shopping. The influence of consumers on one another (aka word-of-mouth) has taken a significant importance in our society, and counting, since the development of new technologies seem to tighten the links between community members every day, and enable more and more conversations and types of conversations between them.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2008, people consumers trust most are persons like themselves, whom they trust even more than doctors for instance. To me this figure shows how influential consumers communities are on people today, and what enables this influence is undoubtedly the trust consumers put in their communities.

Reading the latter figures, I thought that consumers communities were going to need new tools to enable the influence of their members to better express and perpetuate itself. I thought for weeks about how I could contribute as an entrepreneur to this challenge. Then, I talked to several entrepreneurs about the solutions I thought of in order to answer this challenge. Throughout these conversations with web entrepreneurs, the Wizly project was born.

Updated 08/09/2009