Where does the community team belong in a commercial organization?

Cross-posted from the OC Report:

Where does the community team belong in a commercial organization? This topic came up at our recent Online Community Roundtable and we ran out of time before we could properly discuss, so I thought I would queue up the discussion here.

The responsibility for Online Community in many organizations is distributed among several teams, including:

– Marketing, which typically owns blogging, blogging outreach and any sort of affinity community, and has some skin in the game on strategy.
– Product Support, which typically owns Discussion Groups
– Product Development, which may or may not own Discussion Groups, a Beta site, and potentially a “Labs” community, as well as potentially product development communities and user groups.
– Events, which owns “live” events like conference and any online component
– Web Team, (who’s reporting structure is usually a whole different ball of wax) which typically owns some technology and user experience
– IT, if you are REALLY lucky, your IT department is somehow involved with infrastructure.

The above is just a rough composite sketch based on my personal experience. The reality is that in most orgs, it usually more complicated, especially if you are a company involved in building customer community as part of your business, as opposed to customer community being your primary focus.

So, where does the responsibility for community ultimately reside in an org?

Marketing? At it’s best, marketing is about acting as the advocate for the customer back to the organization. At it’s worst, marketing is actively trying to convince customer and prospets to do something they didn’t know they wanted to do, or don’t want to do. A lot of online community activity is coming out of marketing teams today because of typically large marketing budgets, and marketing teams interested in experimenting with new technologies and trends like social networking and blogging. Still, until most marketing teams are REALLY ready to put their own agenda aside and listen to and act on feedback from their audiences, community engagement will be fairly superficial and short term.

Support? Support communities, and in particular those based in Discussion Groups have done the best job of fostering a real sense of community for most companies. Most companies have accepted the fact that the cost of funding Discussion Groups are offset by call avoidance and increased customer satisfaction. Becuase of this, there is generally a spirit of peer cooperation and a genuine interest in helping customers, as opposed to forwarding an agenda. Could the Support organizations role evolve in to an umbrella role of stewardship for all Online Community activity? Perhaps, but I don’t think this would happen in most companies for political reasons, and in particular, Marketing’s “Divine Right” ownership of customer touch-points.

Sales? Probably not. See the “agenda” issue with Marketing.

Product? Maybe, but I see most product teams as participants in a community, and in particular the community ecosystem around their product or service.

IT? Yeah, right.

It really surprises me that there isn’t a more formal approach emerging, and in particular a role on the excutive team like “Community Czar” or “Chief Community Officer”. Maybe this is what the role of CMO wants to evolve in to?

What do you think?