An Online Community is for life, not just for Christmas
I've not blogged for a week and a half now and it's been preying on my mind. The reason is that we've just had an incredibly busy couple of weeks with two newly signed clients and several prospect clients taking up all my time. So while I haven't been able to blog, I have had chance to talk to a lot of people about community.
It seems that online communities are now so well established in the business world that even when a client doesn't already run one of their own, they've heard enough stories about them "going wrong" or "just not working" to get spooked. The main question each of them pose is usually very similar: how can we be sure people will use it?
Two of the companies I've spoken to over the last week had an online community that, by their measure, was a failure. When we discussed why that might be, some common traits emerged.
- There was little (or no) involvement from the target users to define or design the community
- How the Enterprise could benefit from an online community was the starting point instead of its users
- There was no appreciation for what value a user would get out of participating in the online community
- While there was a Project Manager, there was no one who understood or could consistently fill the role of Community Manager
- Valuable content (as defined by the user) was often missing or so out-of-date as to be useless
- Promotion wasn't consistent. It usually started strong but didn't continue and the message wasn't one that always resonated with the target audiences
- Online community does not just equal file sharing with a discussion board
- Building vibrant, entirely virtual online communities without any kind of real-world community is really hard