Right now, every vendor has a channel community, whether they manage it actively or not. In many cases, that community is made up of the vendor's own employees commenting on public sites about their programs and partners.

Vendors need to actively understand and manage their channel and partner communities, both managed and unmanaged. Key initiatives should include:

• Leverage existing partner communities as a foundation for a community strategy

• Take advantage of existing community market momentum and presence, and augment that momentum efficiently to meet goals
• Focus on sponsorship and nurturing, and only where necessary build out additional capabilities to fill gaps
• Create internal best practices and frameworks for community development and propagate them throughout the organization

It is important to focus beyond the immediate vendor partner portal. More often than not, the true community, and conversation, exists outside of the vendor's own community/portal, and the mechanisms for influencing that conversation are varied and subtle.