Corporate Online communities Fail = Be kind please rewind

A Deloitte study on Corporate Online Communities by Ed Moran has made some waves into the digital world. Here’s what you can read from the study coverage done by WSJ: “Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects”. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” as Moran says. Ok, $1 million to set up a community is a big bet. Moreover when the most of the amount goes into building the structure and not into community management consulting and what’s the outcome companies can expect of. It’s sure consulting is important: how can you imagine people getting involved in cat litters, as you can see at the end of the Read Write Web post about the study of Deloitte, you have to think out of the box and identify how to engage people to make them speak of the cat litter … There are some major points marketing people have to take into account and learn from differents digital world before jumping into the community thing; involvement, time consuming, personal benefits, and others.

Examples like the Purina’s Breeze for cats is just one of the many useless communities Deloitte has for sure checked (and laugh out loud about — they sure had a great moment). And to be sure marketing guys from Purina did not understand what’s a community and how to leverage it for their business, just check the URL: there’s nothing about community but “Testimonial”. Testimonials are a different marketing tool. It’s not aimed to make people engage with the brand, but to make people confident in the product and remember that point when they’re to buy cat litter in that example.

To create and make a community interesting for you brand, you have to check the following points

• What make them return (being social is time consuming, you need to give them unique to make them stay and come back)?
• Does that community gives their members a reason to share the info with others?
• Can they be proud to be members of that community?

In the Deloitte study, there’s also another part’s being interesting: the members matter. What’s important in the fact of having 100 or 100 000 members? the quality of content generated by members. Some companies such as Communispace don’t advice for more that 1000 members per community. The reason’s simple: when you’re managing a community, you need to be able to track and analyse all the content and members activity to leverage your community. That means you have to limit your community. Otherwise you jump into another business, that is currently owned by Facebook.

The point is WSJ has coveraged useless information to me. What would have been interesting to tell in order to tease would for sure be more about what’s the conclusion of the study. Is it worthy or not to create and lead a corporate community. The question isn’t about cost, sure it costs a lot to create a community (part of the reason big accounts doesn’t try to leverage that asset, the other part being they don’t have enough information about the return of investment related to), that this would definitly change thanks to the business moving to that area. The question is about what are the key performance indicators and scores corporate communities did according to these KPI.

If you know Deloitte people, I’d be pleased to have a look at that study

Photo credit: Donna

To read more on that topic:

• Word of Mouth + Strategy = engrave it in your delivery strategy
• MySpace Music + Long tail = Indie labels not worthy enough for MySpace
• Blogs + Evolution = reaching maturity and going professional
• Review of the Internet news for Today
• Brand Building + Social Media = Zappos Example and Employee Advocacy