“Why most online communities fail”
Just before I spoke at SEM for SMB last week, Bijoy Goswami sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal piece, “Why Most Online Communities Fail.” I referred to it in my presentation because it reinforced points I was making (I was presenting on the subject of online business communities).
Businesses launching online communities repeat a series of blunders. First, they have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Moran suggests that businesses spend resources identifying and reaching out to potential community members instead of investing in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology.Moran also recommends that businesses put someone who has experience running an online community in charge of the project. This doesn’t sound particularly earth-shattering, but consider that about 30% of the businesses Deloitte studied have only one part-time worker in charge of their communities. Most other businesses put a single marketing pro in charge of their sites.
The article goes on to question community metrics: “Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site.” The lack of clarity about metrics reflects inattention to strategy. Many companies have an idea why they want community, but they haven’t taken time for detailed discussion. It’s more “add this and see if it works” without sufficient investment of time, money and energy to ensure that community does, in fact, make sense and “work” to achieve well-considered goals. Prototyping is not a bad idea, but adding community as an experiment is pointless if there’s no commitment to the experiment’s success.
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:24 am
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July 24th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
I agree with you about having a marketing expert to be in charge. But even with that in place, I have seen many social networks fail. I really still do not know the reason. if i was a betting man, i would say that Facebook will fail because of the very bad UI and how hard is it to figure things out on their site - but it was a success. I really do not know what it takes to make a site succeed.
August 15th, 2008 at 7:23 am
wael, one quibble: neither I nor the material quoted above would suggest having a “marketing expert” in charge. The suggestion is to have someone on board who has expertise in community development and management. Marketing professionals - even those who who are associated with “interactive” marketing - usually won’t have the right combination of skills and expertise to manage online communities.
I also make a distinction between social network platforms and online communities. Facebook, a social network platform, is not a community. Its focus is on facilitating connections and user generated content; the business itself doesn’t do anything to facilitate community development other than provide tools for interaction. Communities are about relationship and history; within Facebook communities may form, but only where users are making that happen, and they could do that wherever the tools exist. In fact, many of the attempts at group-forming and community-building within Facebook don’t work, as when someone creates a group there, then fails to do early and ongoing development work. (I’m guilty of that, myself, but I know others who are building and finding effective communities within Facebook, where people stick within groups or causes, form relationships, and evolve a history of ongoing conversations.)