Comments on: 3 Sacred Cows About Online Community That Need to Be Challenged

By: jkbennett

jkbennett — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:32:32 +0000

Great article. Fundamentals are often forgotten. Communities are going to be hard for many corporations. I think even the biggest operations have very little in the way of well thought out strategies that cascade through the organization well. But they do tend to control things from the top down that they don't understand as well as the those charged with doing it. Communities are an excellent example of this.

This weakness in social engagement is going to be a huge shift in the slate of players in a lot of very competitive and high value areas. I expect I will get a kick out of some of the giants making a mess of this arena.

By: Online Community Links Roundup 26/03/10 | Community Management | Blaise Grimes-Viort

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:51:33 +0000

[...] 3 Sacred Cows About Online Community That Need to Be Challenged [...]

By: awareobserver

awareobserver — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:34:52 +0000

Couple more cows. Social Media are so important and we all have be there and rush into it. Please don't take this for granted and do the same profiling, analysis and strategy work you would otherwise. 10% or even less of registered users of almost any web community is responsible for 100% of the given online activity (posts, comments, moderation, alerts, rumors, threads).

My investment is leveraged
There are almost no serious demographics studies and data available as owners prefer to control access to personal data (and so they should) and often would not want “true” activity figures be divulged. There is almost no serious financial analysis of the financial efforts required to sustain, maintain, refresh, edit, moderate a social presence vs sales, branding, top of mind, shares it generates. Just as for Google advertising, this is a closed loop environment controlled by the owners who tell you traffic figures almost always in contradiction with what ComScore, Neilsen and others observe. And they control ad pricing…

By: Recent Links at Fast Wonder: Online Community Consulting

Recent Links at Fast Wonder: Online Community Consulting — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:33:17 +0000

[...] 3 Sacred Cows About Online Community That Need to Be Challenged [...]

By: heatherstrout

heatherstrout — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:12:00 +0000

Bill, I agree with all three of your "sacred cow" challenge statements. What's interesting is that these are all part of a larger list of items we hear over and over about how online communities *should* be created and managed. The truth is, every community implementation and management effort is different and all of them take a LOT of strategic focus and the successful ones integrate community into the fabric of the organization.

Great catching up with you at sxswi.

Heather | @heatherjstrout

By: Robyn Tippins

Robyn Tippins — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:55:36 +0000

I think Sacred Cow #3 more refers to not building a forum for CompanyX Widgets, when there is already a huge community of Widget users, brand agnostic, at sitex. (ie in the offline world, it's better to take your discussions to the existing Town Hall rather than start up a new one for only your discussions).