The WSJ Wrests Success From The Jaws Of Failure

You may have seen a recent study from Deloitte about how most online communities are failures — companies spend huge amounts of money on them, and very few people show up and very little happens. It’s very reassuring that a traditional organization containing large amounts of people in nice suits has determined this for us — now we can all get back to business as usual, and give up on all this foolishness.

There’s even a great post in a blog on the Wall Street Journal — another great traditional organization – that pretty much bears out the info from Deloitte. Game over, no real success, this community fad has been measured and found wanting. Let’s get a little more ink on the newsprint, Stinky, and we can all get back to writing learned think pieces on how business works.

But wait just a minute. If you take a second to scroll down below the initial blog post, you’ll see over 50 meaty comments from experts all over the world. Some supportive, some not so supportive. Many have links to other data, other sites, and great examples. Lots of these people are tops in the community field, and can really add to the discussion from the inside.

“We host over 600 online communities with over 12 million members. Some of these communities have been online over four years. The bottom line, successful communities are part of a larger engagement plan that includes long-term commitment, push email, event/donation registration and other participatory features relevant to potential visitors. Our clients have raised (not spent) millions of dollars for their causes using online communities.”

Hmmmmm. Seems like we may have a community, here. And it didn’t cost a million dollars, did it? All it took was some blog software (which you can get for free) and one single blog post. Let’s read a little more.

We launched with our original community with the intent of letting the members tell us how to grow it bigger and better, not us guessing what they might want. Now we have a thriving community of more than 18,000 active members! It’s a great example of how community members can really help each other solve real business problems and share insights without intervention or oversight from the company. Plus, they also share their ideas for product or service enhancements, which is invaluable feedback for any growing company.

So now this poor WSJ reporter has gone and accidentally created a community. And that community is headed up the hill towards the castle, carrying torches. Must be a little scary for someone who’s used to writing a story and sending it out to millions of people every day.

Then, we start getting down to some brass tacks. Somebody posts a link to the actual survey. And the analysis begins:

Only 140 companies were interviewed. This doesn’t feel like a large enough representative sample to base a sweeping statement about the inevitable failure of most online communities.

The direct question: “do you (your org) consider your community a success” was not asked. Where in the research is the sentiment that a community is a failure discussed?

Most (54%) of the participants had a community that was less than a year old. This seems like an awfully short timeline to make a decision about success or failure.

96% of the respondents said they would invest as much or more over the next 12 months, with 52% saying they would invest more. It’s seems counter intuitive to me that the majority of respondents would continue to invest in a failing strategy?

The question I have for you / Deloitte is: based on the available data, how did you reach the conclusion that most online communities fail?

So — what do we have here? A thriving, healthy, very effective online community created by a huge corporation. Ta da!

To quote Hannibal Smith, I love it when a plan comes together.