Here are several excerpts from a great blog post by Esther Schindler, an editor with CIO magazine, 6 Stupid Mistakes Companies Make with Their Online Communities. I’ve included just 3 of the mistakes that Esther discusses in this post so I highly recommend that you click through and check out the complete source article. I think you’ll find it well worth the read.
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.
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 conduct the conversation in a venue where you can respond. And by “respond,” I mean, “You have an open and public conversation.” Simply by permitting (and encouraging) the transparency, you admit to the world that your company pays attention to what its users and customers think. That is never a bad thing.
Bottom line: If you want a community to be a success, approach its design and purpose from what the participants will get out of it—not what your company aims to achieve.
2. Forgetting that volunteer participants are part of your company’s community. The people who take the time to post messages in your community on a regular basis are, in some way, committed to your business model. If they write product reviews for your site, it’s because they like your site and what it offers, and they choose it over the competition. With luck, that also means they prefer to give their money to you rather than to a competitor. Cherish that.
If you are going to make a big change in the way the system works, you should involve those committed members in the decision as soon as possible. Listen to them—or feel their wrath. Don’t “announce” a big change in the community system; invite these people to participate in the decision-making. They probably spend more time interacting with the community system than you do.
3. Putting Technology in the Way of the Community. I’ve seen a bunch of companies get their shorts in knot about technology choices. I don’t mean only “Should we have a corporate blog?” but agonizing about their software choice or creating a custom app with bells and whistles. The truth is, the best tools are those that are simple and fast (or which can be automated into simple-and-fast) because they reduce barriers to participation. (That’s probably true for just about anything.) The easier you make it for people to participate, the more they will do so.
The other 3 stupid mistakes that Esther discusses in her article are:
4. Imagining that employees will contribute to an internal community without special attention.
5. “Managing” a community by parachuting in, then parachuting out.
6. Failing.
Check out the complete source article for Esther’s discussion of these 3 mistakes.
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Great stuff Jim!
We\’re all trying to get social networks to work for us and there are a lot of things that most learn the hard way. Thanks for steering us clear!