Do Enterprises Have the Patience to Develop Communities?

Communications, expectations, and business seem to move faster than ever these days. With the constant buzz of the Blackberry, a continuous stream of Tweets, and in incessant interruption of IMs our attention spans have dwindled even more. Our collective attention and patience is a dwindling resource. Yet, community dynamics still require a long-term view. Communities – and I don't mean flash mobs, groups of 10 people, or event attendees because those are not communities – take time to develop and flourish. Measuring communities based on quarterly earnings calendars is a bad way to go but most businesses are focused on short term performance. We are under such intense pressure to show results that we often abort efforts that play out over longer periods.

This is precisely why I think many companies will fail. The benefits of robust communities to a business are enormous and those tantalizing benefits will lead many companies to try to adopt a community strategy. How do we protect community efforts while they are in the maturation stage? How to we measure maturing communities in such a way that we don't set un-achievable expectations that then lead to executive disappointment? How do we keep executives interested and engaged while communities are maturing and not yet performing?

There are certainly ways to encourage faster community maturity. Creating aggressive content strategies and adoption campaigns certainly helps. Having a constituency that is already familiar with social media tools is also helpful. Regardless of adoption and tool use robust communities require community leaders (not just sponsors), rich interactions between members, and a collective sense of the community as a whole. Those subtle characteristics cannot be manufactured in any other way but to have the community develop those traits organically over time.

Communities are one of the hardest types of organizations to launch, develop, and sustain. Two years is a reasonable ramp period and growth comes in fits and starts – metrics have to change over time too. I suggest the following:

Phase 1 (0-12 months): New members, pageviews, ratings, comments

Phase 2 (12-24 months): UGC, posts/user, visits/user/month, % of active members

Phase 3 (24 months +): Activity of community leaders, initiatives/ideas generated, ROI/value measures

Do companies have the patience to wait 2+ years to see value…I'm not sure that most do – what do you think?

Comments

[Kim Kobza]

Just to tie these thoughts back into your original question. It is not a challenge of building new communities. The value proposition is how to leverage their existing networks - consumers, partners and employees - to maximize value from those networks. True - if you measure performance on number of members, page views, etc., you might be disappointed. But if you measure performance on the one good product idea, or the one idea that gave the executive team an understanding of an emerging business problem, higher rates of employee retention, or reaching a relatively large number of customers at substantially less costs than traditional brand building programs, the value proposition is not a hard one to make. It requires investment, but the results are not nearly as abstract or distant as executives may at first believe.

They are already spending the money in business processes with much more abstract value propositions in advertising, research and development, focus groups, surveys, partner events, employee reward systems. Comparatively, community (network) building is a bargain if done correctly. Much higher ROI with substantially less abstraction.

[Rachel Happe]

wow - what a great conversation - lots of great points... clearly an issue that is important to keep an eye on as more companies delve into social apps

[Marc Sirkin]

Rachel,
New reader, first time commenter - nice post. I'm working on a community designed for CIOs (yea, yea, I know!) at Microsoft. We have very well thought out and communicated deliverables that are in fact 3 years out. I'm super lucky to have management support this sort of long term goal and in fact, would have been extremely worried about this assignment if it were any shorter of a timeframe.

Smart companies (and marketers) had better realize that community building isn't like a tradition launch and measure marketing campaign.