Build vs Join

Kevin Gamble:

I know I must sound like a broken record on this point, but the message just isn’t sinking in. What’s it going to take for people to “get” this? A million dollars or 10 million dollars. It doesn’t matter. The people are not coming. You have to go to them. It’s pretty simple actually. The thing is, corporate thinking is all about owning stuff. So the natural tendency is to want a community that you “own” and thus you have to build a new community and get people to come. It’s nice to see some studies highlighting how rarely that actually works though.

Now this isn’t to say that you should tear down all your web properties and start using FaceBook pages instead – it just means that you have to go over to FaceBook or where ever your users hang out and interact with them there. You can still publish useful content on your own site and link to it as appropriate, just don’t expect your site to become the hub of the community.

I find the third key problem from the Wall Street Journal article Kevin references resonates a lot with me:

The third problem with online communities is how businesses go about measuring the success of their communities. 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. The thing about word of mouth is that it quite often is just that – words from people’s mouths. It’s not called spreading news by links to web pages or by visiting sites – it’s word of mouth and that’s incredibly hard to track. Unless you’re insanely caught up in the blogging craze you have to realize that people are more likely to recommend your products by speaking with others, or via email or IM than they are to actually publish a web page that links to yours and recommend people go join up to your community. Most companies focus on something other than creating a community site and it’s that original product that gets recommended, even if it’s because of the community site.

For example, LiveWorks! receives very little traffic when compared to the main Ephox website, but it’s still very high up the list of referring sites but more importantly when you talk to people and say that there’s a ton of information and early access to our products on LiveWorks! they think that’s fantastic and are far more likely to recommend our editors – which live on ephox.com.

Of course, LiveWorks! doesn’t really try to be a community site – it allows comments and provides a mailing list/forum but really it’s a great big collection of useful content about our product. You can’t create an account or a profile there even though we’ve talked about doing something like that. This kind of research makes me realize why that’s never seemed like an absolute must-do idea for me.

Now the question is, where is the community around our products and how do we best go out and join it?