I was fortunate enough to attend a Product Development Management Association (PDMA) meeting regarding online communities last week hosted by Iron Mountain in Southborough, Mass.

The speakers were Eric Schurr of Awareness Networks and Debi Kleiman of Communispace.

It’s too bad it wasn’t a bigger crowd because it was a terrific presentation with lots and lots of questions from attendees (rain and bad traffic were probably a big factor here). How some very large brands are using both private and public online communities to gather information to learn about their customers, and to disseminate information to their customers — and ultimately help get products to market faster — is fascinating.

Communispace’s private communities are created for Fortune 1,000 companies for insight about and innovative ideas by their customers. A major toy brand, for example, had already set up one with about 500 moms – already determined by them to be passionate about toys and thus frequent contributors/visitors to the community — prior to the news about shoddy Chinese manufacturing, which led to massive recalls.

This was fortunatate for the company, because when the news broke, the site was extremely useful to the toy manufacturer, which actually fed the PR machine for press releases and case studies (music to my ears.) Some of the comments made by the community members even made their way to the CEO, underscoring just how valuable the insight gained from these communities really is. Ultimately the toy manufacturer received kudos for the way it handled this crisis, and it believes the community site played a major role in that success.

Public community sites can have a tremendous impact for a company, even down to the bottom line. Take the site created by Awareness for one of the world’s largest hotel chains. It’s said to be responsible for generating millions of dollars in revenue for the chain. In addition, a public site created for a large pharmacy chain included contests for site visitors, generating invaluable customer insights.

Kleiman and Schurr also tied the two different technologies together, explaining how private and public communities can and should work together. One can feed off the other for truly successful online communities – for example, a private community can seed a public community to have a broad impact on the marketplace.

As our clients’ social media activities continue to grow, I’ll be sure to promote the value of online communities, both public and private. While large corporations still dominate in this space, some community-building techniques can be applied to smaller and midsized companies as well. It will be interesting to see how the increasing influence of online communities plays out.

Technorati Tags: Awareness Networks, Communispace, online communities, PDMA