Today, Forbes.com published an article I wrote about the current status of brand communities. I wrote it because I think it’s time for a review of how well or how badly they were being built, and how well or badly they’re using the new technologies that can now enable community-creation.

I wrote a book about cults and cult-like brands (Apple, Harley etc) a few years ago, in which I suggested the next big thing in business was going to be community. Little did I know how big and how fast that would happen. Nor did I foresee Facebook, Twitter and all the other social platforms that are now being used by business to create and enable communities.

Since I left the world of brands and have spent time at Meetup, talked to some of the founders of social networking technologies, and to hundreds of community leaders, I thought it would be especially interesting to calibrate brands’ attempts against the timeless and universal standards of real, successful community-making.

The article is relatively short, and the subject is large. So I can only give it an overview. And I suggest some community-building strategies that brands can take in this new world. But I’ll be coming back to cover this subject in more depth on this blog.

Here’s some of the key issues I take a look at in the article (and that demand more examination):

1. There’s confusion in the brand world about

• a) What a community is.
• b) What the goals are.
• c) how to measure a community’s strength.
• d) Whether it translates to sales.

2.   Some people think they’re creating community, when in fact they’re enabling fandom and   followers (not the same thing).

3.  There are some interesting things being done, especially by those brands for which cult-followings are tough to create because their products are utilitarian (a pen, a mutual fund, a car part for example).

4.  The smartest brand community-makers are:

• Enabling existing communities to connect more easily
• Supporting and nurturing existing communities of interests (like entrepreneurs, Moms, dog lovers) that are aligned with the brand’s goals.
• Being useful. Meaning they are adding value in terms of content, money, insight, infrastructure.
• Being authentic. Not pretending there’s passionate brand lovers when there aren’t. Being realistic about the brand’s role in community-making.

This groovy dude was serving me ice cream in a funky shop in downtown Fort Collins, Colorado, this week.

He’s the Coke equivalent of the Nike ‘ekins’ (Nike spelt backwards), the inner circle of Nike cultdom who go round shops merchandising the product to make their beloved brand look better than any other. That’s what this guy did for Coca Cola.

I’ve been pretty focused on the cult-brand phenomenon in the past (to say the least). But even I found this strangely anachronistic. And then today, when I was talking about culting at Meetup, Scott Heiferman (Founder and CEO) asked me whether there’s a future for brand cults.

To be honest, I’m not sure.

In a culture that we have defined as ‘consumer’, we’ve seen that some brands have become elevated as suppliers of meaning and community. Sitting alongside traditional suppliers like Churches and social organizations, brands like Apple and Harley have provided ideologies and values around which people have clustered, identified and become committed. Whether you like it or not, it’s happened.

But I smell a shift in the culture. Perhaps it’s the recession that has forced a reassessment of the status that material things should occupy in our lives. This could be undermining the credibility of brands to claim and behave like real suppliers of belief and belonging.

Actually, I think the recession has simply accelerated a reassessment that was happening in the collective unconscious anyway. The excellent research that’s happening now on the source of human happiness (check out the short and readable book ‘Happiness’ that neatly pulls all this data together…written by an economist, would you believe!) has finally blown away any delusion that more stuff makes you happy. Once you get out of poverty, any incremental gain in material goods does not deliver the equivalent in happiness.

What makes us happy are things like ability to self-actualize and freedom of thought and action. And interestingly, there is a very strong correlation between belonging to a social network, happiness and how long you live.

Now the question is can a community, which makes us happy and live longer, be credibly based around a commercial product, which we are realizing is not all it’s cracked up to be in the satisfaction department?

My good friend Douglas Rushkoff is questioning some of the same things in his excellent new book Life Inc.. In fact I note he’s questioned my claims in his text, the bugger. He always does that. What are friends for? By the way check out his interview on the Colbert Report where he successfully parries the man himself.

But I think he’s right in his questioning of the role corporations and their products can lay claim to in our lives. I say all this at the risk of pissing off all my former clients and readers. But, to be intellectually honest, I’m not sure there’s a future for brand cults.

So, what do you think?