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August 9, 2004
Cothrel and Ambrozek Online Community Study Report Now Available
Posted by Nancy White
I’m excited to share that Jenny Ambrozek and Joe Cothrel’s report on the Online Communities in Business survey is now on the web. I was thrilled to be able to spend time with them in June to talk about the report and really anxious to share it out to my network. The full pdf report is here. Jenny and Joe are also hosting a wiki for reader feedback and to gather more insights and information. I encourage you to chime in. There are instructions on the report website on how to request access to the wiki.
Here is the intro:
It has been 25 years since online community found its humble beginnings via the first computer bulletin board. Since then, much attention has focused on the impact on society. But how have online communities affected business?
From February to May 2004, we conducted an online survey of people involved in, or deeply knowledgeable about, online community efforts in large organizations around the world. This survey was conducted in concert with the 7th International Conference on Virtual Communities, the largest and oldest annual gathering of its kind.
I have had some time to chew on the initial data and am now savoring the full report. It had both many things I expected as a practitioner, and a few surprises. The optimism of the value of online interaction (I tend to use the word community a little more sparingly!) is validated in what I see in my practice, and the familiar problems are
VERY familiar: challenges with effectively measuring
ROI and still a limited or non-existant understanding of online groups and communities.
I’ll post a fuller review tomorrow (work calls!) but I really wanted to get the news out and spreading - so I’m blogging to do my part! However, there is one piece I want to dangle out front.
The challenge the report delivers me is around the final issue noted by Joe and Jenny on page 4: “The discipline of creating and managing communities is poorly defined.” That is something I, and WE can do something about. How can we contribute?
(Also posted on Full Circle Blog)
Edited on August 10th to fix typo.
Comments (3)
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1. ah on August 10, 2004 5:42 PM writes...
' “The discipline of creating and managing communities is poorly designed.” That is something I, and WE can do something about. How can we contribute?'
There are many facets to this, one of them in this heterogenous world is simply keeping order, keeping a room in the mansion of cyberspace productive and non-toxic. The old [hip business magazine] chat was, for a while, amazing, but the moderator had unpredictable Nanny tendencies based on his biases, personal and political. And an influx of newbies brought semi-literacy and pompous PC received wisdom, so the early lights fled. Just inevitable life cycle, I suppose.
I wonder if an interactive circle might experiment with adopting a stated general purpose, and each participant upfront a statement about how (s)he will contribute to that purpose. The posts can be evaluated in conformity to those intentions. And extremely heavy-handed statements of purpose, or mischevious participant statements, can be negotiated up front.
Just an idea. If we don't get this licked, online "community" is pretty stalled.
Permalink to Comment2. Christopher Carfi on August 12, 2004 1:36 AM writes...
Was glad to see that "customer-facing" communities (service/support, sales/marketing) were given their own section in the report. OTOH, was a bit bummed that those areas only covered 22% of of the respondents (up to 36% if you include "new media/publishing" in the customer-facing bucket).
I still think that this is going to be critical...using collaboration to actually build interactions / relationships on both sides of the customer-vendor table. Glad to see it starting to get some notice.
Permalink to Comment3. Nancy White on August 12, 2004 6:50 PM writes...
ah and Christopher, I hope you'll look into joining the wiki discussion to bring in these points. There is so much more to surface. Thanks
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