One of the things I hear consistently from many organizations who run a “dead”, “dull” or “did not work” community is “Yes we did that – We have 3 wikis, 4 blogs, a discussion board, but we see no traction. Unlike other companies our customers are different, communities wont work”.
There are 3 primary reasons why it does not work in our experience and here’s what to do about it:
1. “Lets put it out there and see what happens” approach: This is the most common. There is mostly a lack of commitment to the community project and most of the time we see that this is done by a director or manager who wants to “prove” to their executive that “New is the new old”. So they put a community bulletin board, tell couple of their co-workers and expect magic to happen within a quarter.
2. “Enamored with cool technology” approach: In this case, you will find they have at least 2 of everything – even for a company with just 20 people . They do a filmloop of their product screen shots, convert their customer presentation to 4 formats – Breeze, Flash, online Powerpoints and put it on FlickR. We consistently find that companies with this
problem have a mostly technical owner for the community.
3. “Build it and they will come” approach: Marketing the community is for “the MBA types with suits” according to these folks. They firmly believe that everything good has
to grow ONLY by word of mouth and in a viral fashion.
These points are not to say most companies dont “get it” when it comes to communities. Here are 3 simple points to think about when you are in a state such as this that has worked for us successfully. Try it and let me know if it works for you:
1. For businesses ultimately there is a business process that needs to be broken and fixed. Start with that business process which you believe is inefficient and THEN figure out how to get the community to help.
2. Focus on the community second – the “participants”, “members” etc. The first few are critical and you need to deeply understand their motivation and desire. Once you figure it out ensure you have a campaign (does not have to be a super bowl ad) to get more of them together.
3. Understand the best “uses” of the technology versus the features it offers third. As opposed to just putting a wiki and hoping people start to write something, why not have people help put your upgrade documentation or install guide via a wiki while the engineers, QA folks and release engineers work on it together?
What do you think?