I love the fact that brands are now conscious about building communities. They’ve finally realized that the social internet matters and that these communities have and will continue to have an enormous impact on their brand, sales, and future success -- whether they like it or not.

The latest to announce a new online forum/community is Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL) with their new Freestyle Voices website. The site officially makes NCL the first cruise line in the industry to allow guests to connect and participate with each other. It gives users the ability to post their own opinions, reviews, pictures and personal stories about their NCL cruise vacation. And it seems to be working. In just a short period of time NCL’s Freestyle Voices is a vibrant community with more than 3,500 questions submitted, 200 stories posted and over 770 shore excursion reviews. But what I like best about the NCL Freestyle Voices is the following:

1. It’s not a separate community/url: Freestyle Voices is part of the NCL main website and heavily promoted on the homepage. This allows NCL to take advantage of the close to one million unique individuals who visit the NCL website each month. Furthermore, quotes from happy cruisers help NCL do the selling. In a world where people are turning to other people for the things they need rather than brands, this is great marketing.
2. It’s flexible and fully integrated: Users of the Freestyle Cruise can not only share their stories amongst themselves but also have the ability to link to those stories, photos, etc. to other social networks like Facebook -- so that people who don’t visit NCL, can view the experience. This also enables the customer and NCL to reach a larger audience.
3. It’s a database & viral tool: NCL doesn’t stop the conversation there. NCL encourages visitors to Freestyle Voices to sign up for the Inside Scoop, their company newsletter offering the latest updates on cruise specials, hot destinations and vacation planning. Visitors can even share the page/site with others across a multitude of destinations including delicious, newsvine, Twitter and more.

What the NCL site (and others like it) demonstrate is that it is not just about the popular social networks (i.e. Facebook), its about being and building community everywhere your customers are, including your own web site – especially your website since that  is where you'll likely to find your best customers.

‘Til Next Time