The Three Reasons?
- Focusing on the technology over the value of the community to its members;
- Failure to assign experienced staff to develop the community;
- Poor or no metrics for measuring success
Check this quote out, from the Experience blog:
Social media tools are the building blocks for communities, but communities are more than the sum of their social media parts. If we look to real world communities as a metaphor for virtual ones, social media functions--forums, blogs, micro-blogs, ratings, profiles, friend lists, widgets, collaborative tools, and the like--are the buildings, roads, and utilities, but if no one moves in (or everyone leaves), there is no community. A site rife with Web 2.0 tools that go unused is like a ghost town--empty of life and uninviting to anyone who chances to wander in. As in the real world, a virtual community isn't characterized by its components but by its people.
A site may offer every social media tool available and still not create a successful community. The hard fact is that many community-building efforts fall short of intended goals. The reason for this is that while you can strive for a community and may succeed at a community, you cannot simply create a community. As Content Ninja says, "We cannot build a community. It just happens ... What we can do is build an infrastructure where the community can live."
You can build the infrastructure, but you need people to nurture it. You need dedicated people who have some experience of online communities and of your members to help feed content and discussion. It may be a long time before the network becomes self sustaining, and you need the energy and staff time to not get discouraged. It also does not happen on an "upward curve" trajectory - in fact there's often a high starting point of interest when the site is launched, then a dip as the early adopters among your members drift away - and that's the critical moment when both staff and volunteers need to expend their energy to keep the momentum going. Make sure you have champions internally and externally, not "half a staff person".
And yes, you need to measure results - and measure the right things. The Wall Street Journal article quoted by David says, "Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site. Moran points out that there isn't much of a connection between what businesses want and what they're measuring. Better metrics might be rankings in Google or the number of inbound links." Also measure things relevant to your particular organization which track return on engagement. Talking about a particular industry book in the forums and the sales of that book in your bookstore rise? That's a metric. Generating buzz about your upcoming conference? You can probably tie that to increasing registrations. But those are the obvious things. What else might be relevant?
I say this all the time, but the technology is the easy part.
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