Why Online Communities Fail

By Simon|Architecture, Blogs, UX|5 Comments

If I had a dollar for every meeting I attended where I heard the line "Hey, let's create an online community for that idea!", I'd be a rich man. You may have seen something similar in your own organization. A week after the meeting, an email goes out to the effect of "Hey all – I've created the http://ournewcommunity site – please contribute!" with the link pointing to a blank wiki, SharePoint site or set of pages.  What happens to the site?  A few curious people may visit, but ultimately it's relegated to the "Now, why did this site exist again?" leagues a few months later.

Sound familiar? Why does this happen? You think you've got a good idea but you when you come to create something online for people to share and collaborate, it never gets picked up. Everyone agrees in the meeting that an online community makes sense, but the adage of "if you build it, they will come" just never seems to work.

I think one the of first problems is thinking that you can create an online community. This is to some degree the same as thinking that you can create a houseplant. In essence, you can't. I'm no biologist, but last time I checked it's not possible to go away and return a few hours later with a houseplant that you created. You can however help facilitate the creation of a houseplant.  You can buy a pot, fill it with soil, add seeds, water it daily, make sure it gets sunlight, and even talk to it if you'd like - and hope that it gets created – but ultimately you cannot create it yourself regardless of how hard you try. It's the same with online communities – which is why I shudder every time I hear someone say "let's create a community". Instead of trying to create a community the effort should be instead on facilitating the creation of – or building of – a community.

Now I don't claim to be an expert when it comes to analyzing why some online communities ultimately fail or succeed, but I feel that I've been through enough successful and unsuccessful ones of my own that I've now established a mental check list whenever I hear the fated words.  For me, there are three main areas for an online community:

Purpose
Every online community must have a purpose for existing. You may think that's obvious, but I've seen many people overlook the elements of what purpose means for an online community.  I believe that there are three elements to purpose: audience, action, and goal with incentive.  Here's the syntax I use in my head:

This online community will be for [audience] to [action] in order to reach [goal with incentive]. 

For example:

This online community will be for [our customers] to [ask questions of other customers who have had similar experiences] in order to [get quicker answers to problems about our product].

Let's take another example – one of our group's more popular communities, Channel 9:

This online community will be for [developers worldwide] to [learn more about Microsoft through videos and podcasts] in order to [increase the transparency and offer a unique internal view of Microsoft].

For me, defining purpose for an online community is like a three-legged bar stool. If you don't have audience, action, and a goal, the stool isn't going to stand right. Who will come? What will they do? What are they here to do?  It's also important to have an goal with incentive vs. just a goal – which means a goal that is beneficial for the audience.  If you have a goal that only benefits you, why would people visit?

Seeding
The second area I see for a successful online community is seeding. When I say seeding I mean the initial "drop" of information that will attract people. The key to seeding the community is balance.  The right amount of seeding is enough information that will attract people to the site and enable them to build on whatever you have in order to reach their goal. 

If you have too little seeding:  People will initially come, but will see that there is nothing and quickly leave (never to return). I've seen this a lot for internal sites in many organizations. People create them in 5 minutes flat - but they don't spend the time seeding the information to get things going. People visit the site only to see a blank document library or no information.  As a result, they are not compelled to add something themselves and subsequently leave.

The opposite of this is over seeding: I've seen this (and been the victim of) in  open source communities and projects. This is where someone will try and build a community around what may be a great idea with great purpose, but then they dump 100Mb worth of source code and project files to the site hoping that people will build on this and make it greater. What often happens is that people visit the site, they get quickly overwhelmed with the amount of content here, feel that they cannot contribute as a result, and leave.

There is no magic formula for the right amount of seeding for an online community – a good example could be some well thought out opening questions on a forum or a set of critical documents for people to comment on – it's really going to depend on your purpose, but it's critical to get this balance right in order to help the users' first experience.

Barrier of Entry
For me, the final must-have for any online community is a low barrier of entry. I've seen a number of online communities fail not because their purpose or seeding was out of line, but because the technical barrier of entry to the community was too high. This tends to affect more closed or private communities more than public properties.  For example:

"Ok, I've set up the online community! Please call the helpdesk on x1234, get them to set you up an account, download the installer from http://ournewcommunity, and remember to set your certificate settings to "allow all" otherwise you'll get an error the first time you login"

These may be valid instructions, but as you can imagine, this could well result in a higher barrier of entry for most users. Remember that for most users, your community will not be their number one priority in life – and joining your community in order to execute on the purpose should be as easy as possible.

In order to help lower the barrier of entry for the community, you can start by asking yourself whether users really need an account to get in? Is the information you are going to be posting really going to be that sensitive? Could I open everything up to read access and then require an account for write access? You can always lock things down or move things out
later on once you have an enthusiastic user base established. Also, ask yourself what barriers you are artificially creating based on your technology choices. What are your users using – and what is going to be the more natural way for them to interact with your community? Is it through a browser? Is it through IM? Is it something else?

Well, that was a little longer than I initially planned, but it's been fun to share – and hopefully some of this is useful. I'm also of course very interested in factors that you've experience that go into making online communities successful.