1. Introduction

Thank you for clicking on our survey.

My name is Sean Moffitt, President - Agent Wildfire (some of you may know me by my blogging handle Buzz Canuck), I am leading this work on brand communities as the recently minted author of Wikibrands (www.wiki-brands.com) and a community enthusiast raving about the prospect of the open web.

We are approaching hundreds of the world's leading brand communities, executive sponsors, web architects and community managers, and gathering insight on the way they plan, manage and analyze their individual communities. In particular, this research focuses on those communities that have been built not as media-based models but as company or brand-based ones.

We believe this is a valuable research effort given its importance to progressive, engaged businesses and ability to translate learnings across community experiences. We've made the bet that you believe it's also valuable too.

Four important comments before you begin:

- thanks in advance - we appreciate the time investment and interest in our survey (it should take 15 minutes) and promise to share the topline results with you when finished. As a small token of our affection, we'll also randomly choose 5 respondents for free books.

- we take your information with kid gloves - your individual responses are kept confidential beyond those immediately evaluating the research, we are interested in the aggregate of opinions and insight that can't necessarily be linked to one community

- spread the love - we would like to get as many people involved in your company's community development to answer the questionnaire, including but not limited to:
- the executive sponsor, head of function that supports community, invlved mangers, social media architect and community managers/evangelists/advocates

...please pass onto them if you feel comfortable

- jump in our pool - we have already interviewed some of the world's leading community-building experts in association with this project but would love to get as many real live experiences/insights played back to us, feel comfortable in emailing my manager Nadia Rushdi (nadia@agentwildfire.com) to schedule in a Skype/phone discussion, you can also join us on Twitter at @communitygurus

Thanks in advance for your participation,

Sean Moffitt @seanmoffitt
2011 Brand Communities Report Sponsor
smoffitt@agentwildfire.com

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