Here’s another process or strategy things too stick your tester nose into. While not so much this year it seems, for awhile you could find all sorts of website relaunches with ‘social media’ aspects to them. ‘Web 2.0 is hot right now, we’ll make a tonne of money’ was the logic. Instead, these strategies fell on their face when left untended to and all that is left are the abandoned remains of the community that could have been. I was talking about this very situation in one of our products yesterday around lunch and then through the weird synchronicity that the firehose of information I have 7 harsh truths about running online communities trickled to the top.

These are the 7 points literally, but are choice bits from them as a whole

  • Community is about people and relationships, not technology. The technology is the easy part. You can have a forum like Vanilla up and running in minutes, but it will take months of hard work to build a vibrant community.
  • If you implement the technology and just sit back then your community will fail. The technology merely allows you to engage with your community in the same way as a telephone lets you talk to your friends. It is a tool and nothing more.
  • You need to show you care.
  • You need to inspire, excite and encourage them.
  • If the community behaves in ways you do not want, then you only have yourself to blame.
  • By admitting you are wrong, it is possible to heal a relationship with your community and actually leave them even more enthusiastic about your brand than before.
  • That is the trouble with community, you simply cannot control it. If you do not allow it to flourish on your site and engage with it there, then it will pop up elsewhere where you have no control over what is written.
  • Before you can even consider adding community features to your site you need a critical mass of users that want to get involved. A lot of companies add community features not because users are asking for them but because management wants it. Communities like that rarely succeed.

So what test cases can we draw from these? (And my own additions?)

  • Are we willing to dedicate a person to this? Not just give them the title of ‘Community Manager’ but let them become actively engaged in it?
  • Do we have the technology to achieve our vision?
  • Do we actually have a vision?
  • Are we doing this for cynical, obvious business purposes?
  • Do we have something worth building a community around
  • Is our desired community already served by another location? Would it be better to join and engage that existing community?
  • Is now the right time to introduce social media to your product? (critical mass?)
  • Is the commitment to this deep within the organization, or just a single person. (Or put another way, if the champion left or lost their enthusiasm is it going to be abandoned?)

I don’t doubt that there are other measures that need consideration, but those are the ones I see most lacking in not just our product mix, but in other so-called social media ‘strategies’. If your role is organizational quality in addition to just software quality, these are important questions to be raised. In my opinion, having no social media is better than having abandoned, stagnant social media.