Common Craft Blog
The Online Community Hangover
By leelefever on March 28, 2005 - 9:41am
The term “online community†has gotten a bad rap in the business world since the late 90’s and I think I know why.
“Community†was held up as a cornerstone of online businesses in the late 90’s. Influential books like Net Gain got executives excited about all the possibilities. The thought was that the Web would enable communities of loyal customers to form and once they do -- the cash would start rolling in. Or so they thought.
In the aftermath, “online community†has become a bad word- something that has come to mean “something we tried in 1998 that didn’t work.†The reputation was well earned in a lot of situations.
What Failed?
Community often failed because of poor implementation- an underestimation of what it really takes to reap the rewards of “community†in a business setting.
In the past (and now), social tools were implemented as an application that would immediately start creating value after being installed. The tools were seen as an end instead of a means to an end. “I thought the message board was going to create a community!â€
This view of social tools (message boards or email lists at the time) often created a mismatch between the tools and the needs of members/customers. The IT folks put a message board up and moved on to the next application.
What was missing was a plan of action- an understanding of how to design and implement the tool around the needs and capabilities of the customers. A plan was missing for giving “community†a fighting chance to get a foot hold.
When online community failed, it often failed because it was an end without a viable means.
Here we go again
The business world is changing, community is back on the radar and businesses are once again looking for ways to reap the rewards of building “online community.â€
New tools like blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking, etc. represent new tools for bringing people together on the web- but the same questions still exist:
- Where do we start?
- What are the capabilities, limitations and appropriate uses of the tools?
- What concepts and designs will work for our customers?
- What are the best practices for using these new tools?
- What is the ROI? How does it impact the bottom line?
- What does success look like?
Social Design for the Web
Social Design for the Web helps answer these questions. Social Designers can guide organizations through the process, acting as a translator between the technology, customer needs and business goals. If community is a goal, Social Design for the Web is a step toward understanding the right set of considerations and inputs to get moving toward it.
Maybe this next time around, community will become a good word.
The Online Community Hangover
Great stuff!
I think that you're absolutely on track here. I think that the biggest reason that "community" failed in circa-1998 was that businesses were using their 1980 business mindsets to approach community. Most community was thought to happen on the corporate Web site, not where the people actually already were (which was rarely on the corporate site). When no one showed up, they assumed that community didn't work, rather than understanding that like real estate, it's all about the location, location, location.
The Online Community Hangover
Hi Lee,
Just posted this which I think is mooshing around the same territory. I'd love to know what you think (especially in relation to the social networking / blogs / FOAF stuff:
Centered communication: Weblogs and aggregation in the organisation
http://incsub.org/?page_id=19
Cheers, James
The Online Community Hangover
Thanks for the link James, that's a great paper. I think it does point to a number of reasons discussion boards had such a hard time getting going- they did not provide the user a resource for developing, owning and nurturing a consisent identity.
It reminds me of this too: Comparing Social Networking to Online Communities.
I really like the idea of centered communication. It makes me think of everyone having a front porch and feeling comfortable voicing their opinions there.
Some like to go out to the town square and talk amongst the public, but it's only a sub-set of the folks who prefer to speak from home. The town square is intimidating.
Discussion boards are the town square and blogs (along with RSS) are the front porch and people will generally use the front porch more because it's theirs to do with what they wish.
OK, so that's the image that popped into my mind...
Oh, and thanks for the reference!
The Online Community Hangover
Much of this resonates very strongly with me in my experiences in corporate learning. "The tool is the solution" is a mindset I've seen time and time again and fought time and time again in the corporate world.
Talk to any group of long-time corporate learning experts and you will likely hear dozens of stories of training programs that failed because of some of these exact issues.
Old school corporate thinking is very strongly attuned to problem solving. Unfortunately, most corporations are generally not very good at framing the problem they are trying to solve nor are they particularly adept at selecting appropriate interventions to solve their problems.
In my career, I have been called upon dozens of times to implement training programs to try to solve problems for which training is very poorly equipped. Training cannot solve problems created by inequitable compensation, hostile management, inadequate performance evaluation systems, poor support systems, or bad policies. And yet, these are what many corporate training managers are asked to do all the time.
On another front, most corporations are not terribly visionary when it comes to embracing new ideas, technologies, or methodologies. Especially when they are not presented in the context of a specific goal or objective. The advent of the worldwide web is a classic example. Many corporations pooh-poohed the web when it was in its infancy not because they didn't think it was cool but because they couldn't point to a problem it would solve. Nonetheless, web technology has revolutionized most business and the number of intranet pages in the world likely outnumbers the number of public Internet pages in the world. Nortel intranet passed the one MILLION page mark all the way back in 1997! http://www.nwfusion.com/intranet/1215intra.html.
It is not surprising to me that old-school corporations have a difficult time seeing the value of social networking. It seems to me that social networking is less a solution to a specific problem and more a concept that enables all sorts of improvements in ways that will only be discovered through implementation. As such, I think it will be a tough sell in a corporate world that is so strongly attuned to problem solving. Despite the lessons of the world wide web and intranets, most old-school corporations may be loath to embrace social networking because it is really a way of enabling values than it is a solution to any specific problem. Deploying a vision and letting the people figure out how to derive value form it is simply way too democratic and freewheeling for the old-school crowd, IMO.