Most corporate community organizers are thinking too small when they set goals for their online community efforts. The result is that most community efforts fail to make it to the top of the CMOs priority list - both because of the low relative investments for the community efforts as compared to other marketing programs, and because of the low relative returns to the business’ bottom line.

Look at one of the flagship case studies in Groundswell, the recent blockbuster book on social technologies authored by two well known Forrester analysts. In it Lego is being touted as a smashing success story for communities. They were able to increase sales by $500K with an investment of $200K.

Who cares? Lego is a $1.8B company, so increasing revenue by $500K is not moving the needle - it represents a whopping increase of 0.027% of sales.

And that is one of the better case studies. Let’s take a look at Bank Of America’s community efforts for small businesses. It looks like they have a little over 15,000 members, and I am sure that there are many people within BoA who are patting themselves on the back with the success of this effort. But with millions of small businesses as clients and with millions of transactions every day from those clients, how many millions of people do you think you need in your community to move the needle? I am not sure about the exact number, but I do know that it is a heck of a lot more than 15K members.

And you can keep going on and on with examples. When a commerce site takes in 40,000 orders per day, how many members do they need to make a difference? When you have millions of tax customers, how many people do you need in your community to affect the bottom line?

Until marketers think differently about the scaling issues of their communities and the associated investments, communities will have a hard time going mainstream. And yet, when done properly, they could deliver game-changing results - eBay customers who participate in their customer support communities bring in 50% in increased revenue to the company.

Let’s go back to the Bank of America example. Apparently someone calculated that the value of a new small business customer is $100 - if you refer a small business you get $50 and so does the small business. Let’s assume that BoA has 10M small business customers (they had 59M consumers and small business customers combined in 2007). If a marketing program is to increase the number of small business customer by 0.5% that would mean an increase in 500,000 new customers worth $50M. I am sure that this is not out of the realm of possibilities for them to spend this kind of money on TV advertising, even though $50M in TV ads would probably not deliver 500K new customers. But do you think they spent anywhere near that on their community? And if they would, do you think they could deliver a resource to the small business community that would attract much more than 15K members and that could result in much higher reference sales?

You can argue the numbers, but you cannot argue the scale issue…