Online communities

[Nicosam]

Hello everybody,

I am currently doing a benchmark for the launch of a community and I would like to ask if you maybe know some companies who launch online communities which failed.

I heard about the Mercedes community but that's all.

If you have some examples to share or some examples you think about, it could be great !

Thank you very much ! :D

[vangogh]

I don't have any examples to share, but I'm pretty sure most online communities fail for one of a couple of reasons. One is that the person or persons running the online community don't put in the effort. I see many who think all they have to do is open the doors and others will fill the place up with content. People don't join inactive online communities. In the beginning the owners of the community need to be the most active members, but they usually aren't, so the community remains empty.

Sometimes there's no need for a community. Some businesses try to force one in the hopes their customers will share information or build up the content or whatever, but the customers have no interest in becoming part of the community.

Another reason is that a similar community already exists and there's no reason for people to join a second one or switch from the first.

I realize thats not quite what you asked, but I didn't have any specific examples to share and I wanted to help keep your thread active. Hopefully something I said was useful.

[turboguy]

I would say that I see more fail than succeed. I really don't want to post too much detailed info but there is one where I have been involved for over a decade. I had seen a dozen competitors spring up over the years and only one survived. I also have an online community relating to my business where I participate. They are very strongly entrenched. I had seen lots of people try to start a competitive site including the person who formed that one and later sold it to a publishing company. They are ghost towns until they finally decide to stop wasting money. It is not an easy road.

[Harold Mansfield]

Just from memory there quite a few failures over the years Jaegermeister (yep, had my @jaeger.com email address), Budweiser, Miller, Ford, T-Mobile, Microsoft, Yahoo, MTV (although that did work for a while), and I'm pretty sure all of the major networks gave it a shot.

There are a LOT more, these are just the ones I remember.

[KristineS]

Years ago, when I was a new Director of Marketing at the company where I still work, we launched an online community for our customers. I didn't understand the industry yet, and didn't understand that it lagged behind quite a bit when it came to technology. I figured everyone would flock to the site as there was nothing else like it available. As it turned out, there was nothing else like it because the industry was not yet ready for it. So it failed miserably. Did help me understand a lot about how this particular industry works though.