6 Stupid Mistakes Companies Make with Their Online Communities
Or, The Barkeep and the Bouncer. Call 'em social networks, discussion forums, blogs, whatever. Some businesses have never learned to distinguish between participating in a conversation and trying to sell an online audience. Here's a free clue: the latter doesn't work.
User-contributed content is big business nowadays. The whole notion of community is far more common than it was when I started posting on BBSes and when I was a CompuServe sysop. There are now several online community and social network business models and justifications, including online advertising (as it is here at CIO.com), review/rankings that can encourage product sales (Amazon is the prime example), membership upselling (as at Flickr or LinkedIn), brand-building corporate blogs, open source projects that want to encourage more developer involvement, product support sites and probably a few that slipped my mind. This is a major change. At an online community conference I attended in 2000 (where Craig Newmark discussed his intention to maybe take Craigslist beyond San Francisco), most of us community leaders were fretting about how to demonstrate community ROI. While that's still a concern, I think Management is already sold on the necessity for online customer interaction, even if they aren't sure what they're going to do with it.
But "doing community" doesn't mean "doing community well," and I'm sad to say that plenty of businesses have screwed it up (and often pointed to the wrong source of failure). In the 25 years I've shared myself with the world online (I live more in TCP/IP packets than in a physical community), I've seen entirely too many dumb mistakes made, over and over, usually by businesses that should know better. Here's some of the stupidest errors. We'll pretend that your company hasn't made any of them.
1. Trying to control the conversation.
Actually, the problem here is that the company generally doesn't recognize that they're in a conversation. They think of the online community as part of a "marketing message," which has a defined target audience, on-point theme, and so on. All of which can and should be controlled by a marketing department. And which completely misses the point of community.
As my friends Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote so many years ago in the Cluetrain Manifesto, the Internet has helped to make the world an ongoing, always-on conversation. Conversations do not happen from a podium. They rarely happen from a panel discussion, even if audience members can ask questions of the Authorities. Conversations happen around a table, with everyone on more-or-less equal footing (though some people will always know more than others... and that's one reason people show up).
Still, far too many businesses set up an online community and then insist that they have to control the conversation. Criticisms are removed; questionable language rejected; conflict discouraged. All very Happy-Happy-Joy-Joy. And always a complete flop.
People don't come to a company's community because they want to see only good news. They participate because they want to share successes and failures. Because they want to solve a problem, or to help someone else avoid one. (And for several other reasons that I won't go into.)
If avoiding the problem of "I wasted 50 bucks" means they'll write, "I hate this product and I'm sorry I bought it," they're going to share that passionate response. They might write it on your site, or they'll write it on Amazon, but they will write it. Your only option, on a company-sponsored site, is to
Previous Post: Does IE6 Still Matter?Next Post: The Differences Between Dynamic/Scripting Languages and "Regular" Languages...
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
