Joe Cothrel and Jenny Ambrozek have released a survey report that focuses on how online communities are being used in business and what we can expect in the future. It's called: Online Communities in Business: Past Progress, Future Directions
Among the findings:
- Participation in online communities, networks, and teams is growing (82%)
- Technologies for online groups is continuing to improve (79%)
- Retention of participants is not a significant problem (63%)
Despite these positive signs, some familiar problems persist:
- Most organizations can’t measure return on investment (72%)
- Many people still don’t understand what online community is (72%)
- The discipline of creating and managing communities is poorly defined (59%)
While there were few surprises (RIO is hard to measure, etc.) here are a few things that I found interesting in the report:
We are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the creation of the message board- reportedly created during a Chicago snow storm in 1978.
With all the new and cool technologies like weblogs and wikis becoming online community tools, little attention is paid to the lowly message board these days. Yet, the survey results show that respondents plan to be using message boards more frequently than any other tool in five years (though to a lesser degree than today). See pages 16-17 of the report.
On the same table, respondents say that they plan to be using Weblogs more frequently than than any other technology 1 year from now.
To me, this suggests that respondents are learning about weblogs, but have yet to test them as online community tools- but plan to in the next year.
I was also excited and pleased to see that I was listed as an "influencer". Thanks to this weblog, I imagine.
Overall, I think this report is an interesting snapshot of the state of business online communities today. I had hoped for a larger sample size, but 135 isn't bad.
Here's my own look at the near-future of business online community tools:
While message boards have been a standard community tool for years, we are seeing a host of technologies emerge that can be integrated into message board-based environments.
I think the we'll see future growth in message board communities integrating weblogs and wikis as community tools. While message boards will manage group discussions, weblogs may provide a community news and culture source and wikis can be a place to accumulate or collect the knowledge that is created by the group. In much the same way, social networking tools (like visible networks) may get into the mix as well.
I also think, in the future, we'll see that "standard" online community tools include a diverse set of resources that are disparate today.
Nancy White also http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/2004/08/ambrozek-and-cothrel-report-onlin... some preliminary comments.