Quelle: CIO USA
Online communities - news groups, chats or threaded messageboards in which like-minded people congregate to shareideas, solve problems or work on projects - were once thoughtto be the Web's killer app. The Web, its visionariesbelieved, could bring an unlimited number of people togetherno matter how geographically far-flung. And once all thosepeople were gathered around the cyberhearth, theircollective influence and buying power would dwarf anythingthe unmediated physical world could offer.
Well, yes and no.
At first, yes. Sort of. The fact that people could writetheir own reviews, post them and then discuss them withother book lovers certainly gave Amazon.com a first-moveradvantage that translated, at least initially, into acultlike popularity. Observers watched the onlinebookseller's popularity skyrocket due to the frenzy ofactivity and sales generated by this unique feature. And so,hoping an online community would have the same effect ontheir company as it seemed to be having on Amazon.com,companies building websites, including brick-and-mortarestablishments, made adding online forums a toppriority. Community, after all, was an obvious way toleverage the Web's essence: interactivity.
The question of whether encouraging site visitors tointeract with one another actually had anything to do withthe business was rarely asked. Everyone knew that hosting anonline forum would make your site stickier. Sticky meantmore eyeballs. More eyeballs meant profits - from sales oradvertising revenues - beyond the dreams of avarice.
But somehow, for some reason, eyeballs didn't always turninto money. The most successful online communities weren'tfor profit, such as The Well, which, with a VAX computer anda rack of modems in an office in Northern California beganin 1985 as a text-only discussion group for Web enthusiasts,activists and techies (and is now owned by the strugglingSalon.com). GeoCities, which launched in 1994 with the goalof connecting millions through personal webpages, hasn'tfulfilled its mission; instead of a bustling virtualcommunity, it has become a simple provider of diskspace. Even Amazon.com's initial advantage diminished overtime, and the bookseller has yet to declare a profit. Theonline communities other companies established during thoseheady days of Internet experimentation often languished,becoming ghostly haunts visited by the occasionalcrank. Instead of generating value in the form of increasedrevenues or even customer loyalty, they just sucked up theresources of employees who could be deployed on other Webprojects and used money that could be spent on otherapplications. The investment in community becameincreasingly difficult to justify because sites couldn'tarticulate, let alone measure, the value it added.
Web Business 50 winner REI.com doesn't see any correlationbetween its sales performance and the threaded bulletinboards on its site. The message boards are "not hurtinganything, not helping anything," says Joan Broughton, vicepresident of online and direct sales for Kent, Wash.-basedREI. "If I had to put more money into it, I wouldn't," shesays bluntly. "But I don't have to."
Companies that have had little tangible business successwith their online communities generally rushed to put themon their sites without evaluating whether they were reallyappropriate for their company, establishing a business goalor objective for them, or realizing that it actually takeseffort to get visitors to participate.
Some companies, however, did community right and reaped therewards, such as:
A few of the websites being honored as this year's WebBusiness 50 - tech book publisher O'Reilly & Associates; ski,skate, bike and snowboard manufacturer K2 and the AmericanCancer Society - cater to distinct communities and have goneto varying lengths to reach them. Each Web Business 50winner possesses insights and best practices to share.
Eight Million Ways to Get Involved: OReilly.com
The technology books that Sebastopol, Calif.-based O'Reilly& Associates publish (the ones with the cute animal drawingson their covers) are geared toward a very specificgroup - software developers. So it would make sense forO'Reilly to have some sort of community forum on its 8million-page site. Or would it?
"There are already great forums existing on the Web fordevelopers - Usenet News, for example," says Allen Noren,director of Web services. "It's not worth our effort to tryto replicate those." So instead of supporting a chat room ora bulletin board, O'Reilly takes a different approach tobuilding a community on its site: It takes on politicalissues.
For example, about two years ago, Tim O'Reilly, founder ofthe company, spoke out against the lawsuit Amazon.com filedagainst Barnesandnoble.com for using a feature similar toAmazon.com's patented one-click ordering tool. O'Reillydidn't think it was fair for Amazon.com to patentopen-source tools that it acquired only because those toolswere freely available in the first place.
On Feb. 28, 2000, he posted an open letter to Amazon.com onOReilly.com. At the end of the letter, O'Reilly invited sitevisitors who opposed the patenting of software applicationsto type their name onto a petition. O'Reilly says thepetition accumulated 10,000 signatures in 60 hours andpersuaded Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to rethink his company'sstrategy. And although that admission didn't stop Amazon.comfrom pursuing its suit (which was decided in its favor),according to O'Reilly, Amazon.com ceased trying to patentother applications and business processes.
O'Reilly's letter also led Bezos to accompany him toWashington, D.C., in an effort to educate legislators aboutsoftware patents. That meeting may have discouraged othercompanies from maliciously enforcing software patents.
Noren believes that such grassroots initiatives makedevelopers more loyal to O'Reilly's brand and therefore moreinclined, for example, to pick up O'Reilly's book on Javainstead of a competitor's.
"[In July] we had almost 1.8 million unique visitors. Anunbelievable number of people come two to three times aweek," says Noren, crediting the site's activism for thetraffic. "If you can get people coming two to three times aweek, and consistently, you can bet that a lot of people arebuying our books."
Not only do IT professionals buy O'Reilly's books, butthey also offer ideas for new ones. Two years ago, a fewvisitors to OReilly.com began asking for a book on Exim, anopen-source-based agent similar to Sendmail that isresponsible for routing and delivering e-mail. O'Reillypolled site visitors, asking them if they would beinterested in a book on Exim. They said yes. Now the problemwas, who was going to write it? Then Philip Hazel, the manwho began building Exim in 1995, stepped forward,virtually-speaking, and Exim: The Mail TransferAgent hit the shelves in July.
OReilly.com's success is a result of the company finding adifferent way to approach community, one that differentiatesthe publisher from the countless websites offering chats andbulletin boards to serve software engineers.
"Online communities can get an issue on the table. TheInternet allows broad communities of people to form and actin concert," says O'Reilly.
The Trouble with Chat: K2
Like O'Reilly, the folks at K2 get ideas for new productsfrom people posting messages on their various websites'bulletin boards (the company operates more than 10 differentsites). The board on K2's ski site has been hugelysuccessful, in part because the company makes it easy forpeople to use. Unlike many sites, K2 doesn't require alengthy registration process.
The bulletin board on Web Business 50 winning siteK2skis.com accumulates as many as 800 new postings a dayduring peak season. Its bicycle site, K2bikes.com, humsalong with a few hundred postings per day during peakseason. Managing such popular forums presents challenges,the most pressing of which is to what extent K2 shouldmonitor content. The lessons the company has learned havemade it a Web Business 50 winner.
When the Vashon Island, Wash.-based manufacturer launchedits bike site in 1997, it also built a threaded bulletinboard known as the Tech Forum where customers could askquestions and get answers about their bikes from otherowners. Instead of listening to Muzak while on hold,customers could simply sign in to the message board and typetheir question. K2 customers took to the application likeboots to bindings. The problem was, bike owners weren'talways getting the best advice.
"We have problems with people going in [to the forums] andthinking the advice is coming from a [K2] technical rep whenin fact it might have come from a 13-year-old," says AliWise, Internet services manager at K2. She worries that if acustomer gets bad advice on the bulletin board, he willquickly become a former customer.
Employees in the marketing department read the postings whenthey had time. They addressed bad advice by starting newthreads. But this was very labor intensive.
K2 put a disclaimer on the sign-in page reminding users thatthey were not getting information from K2representatives. But now K2 is going further, accepting thefact that it has to be more careful both with theinformation customers glean from the board and with itseffect on K2's brand.
The Tech Forum still exists, but in a different form. It'snow an archive of troubleshooting guides, instructions andtechnical FAQs all in PDF format that owners can print outor save on their hard drive. Customers can e-mail questionsnot listed in the archive directly to the company. To makeit easier for the marketing and customer service departmentsto handle all the inquiries, Wise implemented a Web-basedCRM application. The application routes customers' e-mailinquiries to the proper department, does keyword searchesthrough a database of possible answers and thenautomatically composes a response that a K2 employee cancustomize.
Wise has temporarily shut down the bulletin board while sheimplements this new CRM system. She says the company intendsto relaunch the board in the first quarter of 2002 as aforum where people can share their experiences on K2 bikesand where the company can promote new products and demos.
Wise believes that the key to getting people to buy K2'smerchandise is to provide them with good service.
"If someone is riding K2 skates, they might be inclined tobuy a snowboard if they felt like they had support directlyfrom us," she says. Finding a way to manage its onlinecommunity has allowed K2 to provide that support moreefficiently and convert K2 skiers to K2 bikers.
When Community Is the Product: American CancerSociety
For the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society (ACS),fostering a sense of community among cancer patients,survivors, their families, and ACS's donors and volunteersis an implicit part of the nonprofit organization'smission. For ACS, community is about more than Web-basedtools; it's about helping people cope and survive.
What's special about ACS's website, Cancer.org, is how itsdesign leads users to community. When the ACS undertook theredesign of its website last summer, it analyzed whatcommunity meant to the organization and its constituents. Italso explored how the idea of community should manifestitself on the site, and it mapped how visitors move throughthe site to find applications that connect them to others.
Before the redesign, message boards and other interactivecommunity forums were located in just one area, on aseparate subsite of Cancer.org. James Miller, ACS's directorof Internet strategy, says that community was such animportant aspect of Cancer.org that ACS wanted to weavecommunity features throughout the site. No matter wheresomeone affected by cancer was on Cancer.org, she couldeasily find her way to a chat room or message board.
To determine how the site should be redesigned to suitusers' needs, ACS worked with Cambridge, Mass.-based systemsintegrator Sapient. Members of the two organizationsvirtually lived with cancer patients for a week to learnabout their lives, the information they needed and thesupport they sought. Based on that experience, they drew upscenarios illustrating why a person visits Cancer.org andhow they move through the site. For example, they determinedthat Joe - a hypothetical individual recently diagnosed withprostate cancer - would first come to Cancer.org looking forbasic information about the disease and treatment, so ACSput those links on the homepage. He might then be interestedin finding out about support groups near where he lives, soACS put a search function on the homepage where Joe couldenter his ZIP code and find out about events in hiscommunity. Joe can also find out about support services whenhe links to general information on prostatecancer. Eventually, Joe will want to know what questions heshould ask his doctor, or what he should be monitoringduring his treatment. ACS decided that it was best for himto get this advice from fellow patients and survivors, so itput links to chat rooms and bulletin boards both on itshomepage and on pages with information on the disease.
Even before the redesign, the ACS chat rooms and messageboards were immensely popular, accounting for 27 percent ofthe traffic to the site, according to Miller. Eighteenpercent of the user population was active in discussions onan ongoing basis, he says. (As CIO went to print, Miller wasstill configuring the site's reporting software and didn'thave usage numbers for the community forums on the newsite.)
ACS's community-building also has a bottom-linecomponent. Miller says creating a sense of community amongACS's constituents helps the organization grow itsrelationships with them. "If someone comes to us and isinterested in volunteering, we want to convert them intosomeone who also donates. If someone comes to us looking forgeneral health information, we want to convert them tosomebody who volunteers for us," he says.
Offering a sense of community also ties people to ACS andits mission. Miller says ACS's constituents have a sense ofloyalty to the organization because they're a part of thewebsite's community. "For a nonprofit, that means you'realways going to be at the top of a person's mind when theystart thinking about donations," he says.