online communities

I originally wrote today's post for CallidusCloud CX; it appeared on their blog on May 23, 2017.

I have been saying for a very, very long time (back in 2001 I wrote a research note for Gartner, and in 2003 Michael Maoz and I spoke about this already at the conferences… and, oh yeah – in the late 1980s when I was moderating Compuserve forums I gave an interview for PCWeek about them – and I am sure there’s more, but you are bored of hearing me say how awesome I am — even though I am) that communities are the end goal for business.

If you follow the news you know that GetSatisfaction was acquired by Sprinklr last week (link to press coverage).

It is very easy to get excited by social media. By “Likes” and “Follows”. To think about the tools you can use. To worry about creating content. To feel you must rush to be on the latest platform or site. But in all this excitement it can be easy to forget something that is more important than the tools, platforms and sites that you can make use of – the skills and expertise you need to identify, manage and grow a true online community.

Imagine if you could arm your browser with a filter that selectively kept marketing information away from you. Obliteratethe ads. Delete the search results. White-out the babble of angry or ersatz reviews.

What if faux ads and social campaigns destroyed real marketing, revealing the facts and falsehoods through spot-on and sometimes hilarious content that looked just like the real thing?

The facts speak for the themselves: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million and is selling it this week to Specific Media for $35 million. It made its purchase price back perhaps a couple times over by crapping out the site with innumerable ads (remember, News Corp. was simply exploring new distribution channels and the ad model was the most obvious way to monetize the thing). But users abandoned MySpace in droves, from a peak of 90 million in 2006 to 18 million 4 years later. Today, the thing is all but dead.