Planning on Starting an Online Community? Read This First!

Interesting article in the Business Technology blog over at WSJ.com on Why Most Online Communities Fail. Of note:

[Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant] 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 fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects" but only have a part-time worker managing their communities signifies a major disconnect to me. If you're going to throw a cool mil at a project, why not add two or three full-time employees to the mix? That's basically a rounding error at that point. Like home care workers or nurses, this could be the fastest growing job market of the next decade...but only if companies take these online communities seriously.

Personally, I don't know if I'd invest the money in an online community, but it would greatly depend on my product or service. Is it something people love and love to talk about? Even so, I wouldn't join a Slush Puppie community, or even a Spider-Man community. (OK, maybe I would, but only if the username PeterParker was still available.)

I also question what's the benefit of joining yet-another-corporate-online-community when so many general ones exist with larger user groups. I guess I'm satisfied with just Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Plurk.

Thanks to Josh Hurley for the link.

Rich Brooks
Now What Did I Do With My SecondLife Login?

Comments

[Konnects]

Interesting post. At Konnects we offer a community features tool. I've seen many users build communities for their companies and organizations to help expand and grow their business. This is a fairly new way but has proven to be very successful.