Utilising online communities to preview and promote new products will help to create word of mouth and establish influential brand advocates early on, but only if a brand chooses the perfect audience and does it on the communities terms.

This week Ford announced that after a successful campaign last year, it is planning further activity around its range of family cars, including the S-Max and Galaxy, on parenting community Mumsnet. The community and its founders are well known for being not only important decision makers within their own homes, but influential in the wider world, so what better place for Ford to gauge opinion and get feedback?

The activity last year saw some of the members testing out the new cars and presenting back their unedited thoughts to the community. Ford was happy with the results and now plans to carry out similar activity throughout the whole of 2010.

There is no doubt that the company has formalised a partnership with Mumsnet because the audience was exactly right, but by putting the community in control and using unedited feedback, it didn’t compromise the values or integrity of the community.

At an AOP conference about social media earlier this month Lulu Phongmany from womens portal iVillage spoke about their community pages and how, despite many approaches from brands, they had so far been careful to select which brands they allowed to be a part of the community. According to Phongmany, a highly successful campaign on the iVillage community for Nintendo Wii Fit last year has prompted interest from other brands. The reason they had not taken on activity with a lot of these brands, she said, was because making sure they respected the community came higher in iVillage’s priorities than taking advertising money.

Both examples are for sites for women, but the rules should be applied to brands wanting to interact with established communities in any sector. The brand or product has to fit in perfectly for the community and the community needs to feel in control or there is a risk that not only will it fail for the brand, but the community will move elsewhere.