ONLINE COMMUNITIES

People Who Need People

Meridith Levinson ist Autorin unserer US-Schwesterpublikation CIO.com.

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.

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