为什么Online Community会失败？

WSJ的专栏博客Business Technology今天写到了一篇文章，“Why Most Online Communities Fail”。这篇文章的出发点是德勤的一位咨询顾问Edman Moran的研究报告。Moran研究了100个商业网络社区，发现“hirty-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”。

下面的贴出了这篇文章，尽管简短且没有深入分析，但里面有却道除了目前Online Community失败的症结所在。即目前进行商业网络社区的目的以及度量标准并不是非常清晰。尽管很多商业网络社区的目的是为产生“口碑（Word-of-Mouth）”，但最后的衡量标准却是网站的浏览量等等。这些因素导致了网络商业社区投进去的钱看不到明确的效果。

关于如何衡量网络社区甚至是网络营销活动，的确是目前marketer和brand manager所需要思考的问题。

——————————————————————————————————————

One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.

That’s according to Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant who just completed a study of more than 100 businesses with online communities. Not surprisingly, these sites failed to gain traction with customers. 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,” Moran tells us.

Businesses launching online communities repeat a series of blunders. First, they have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Moran suggests that businesses spend resources identifying and reaching out to potential community members instead of investing in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology.

Moran also recommends that businesses put someone who has experience running an online community in charge of the project. This doesn’t sound particularly earth-shattering, but consider that about 30% of the businesses Deloitte studied have only one part-time worker in charge of their communities. Most other businesses put a single marketing pro in charge of their sites.

The third problem with online communities is how businesses go about measuring the success of their communities. Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site. Moran points out that there isn’t much of a connection between what businesses want and what they’re measuring. Better metrics might be rankings in Google or the number of inbound links.

-作者：Ben Worthen，是华尔街日报英文版Business Technology博客的作者。