A Recipe for Not Getting Your Community off the Ground

By Matthew Lees

Ingredients:
•    ½ Tbs old-school business mind set
•    7 oz. siloed business units
•    2 tsp fear of the unknown
•    1 cup over-analysis

Mix ingredients together. Remove leadership, vision, and an understanding of customer needs. Serve chilled.

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A terrific marketing communications manager I know was charged with doing preliminary research and laying the groundwork towards building an online customer community. She works at a large B2B company that designs, manufactures, and supports particular high-tech products used in all sorts of equipment. With the excitement from this new and interesting project, she tackled her assignment with fervor, bringing in a lot of knowledge about business planning and goals, technology requirements and platforms, necessary resources, milestones and timeframes, and so on.

This was a year and a half ago. The community has yet to launch.

Why? The main reason is that the organization’s culture and structure got in the way.

The initiative started in marketing communications. The original goal was to provide a community space for engineers to ask questions, find answers, pose problems, find solutions, and learn from each other, with the company participating ensuring a comfortable environment and chiming in as warranted. The vision was for this community to be a place where thought leadership developed and where learning and education were the norm (particularly for younger engineers, who could learn from the experiences of the veterans), not only about the company’s products, but also about their overall industry.

[To answer the question you’re about to ask…the support organization, already understaffed, wasn’t particularly interested in the project, which is why marketing took it on, as a customer engagement effort.]

Internal Pushback

As these plans developed, there was pushback from people with concerns that they were moving too quickly. The company has been around for many years, and there were too many concerns about the uncertainty of this strange new. They appreciated that they eventually had to go in this direction, but wanted to take things more slowly. In particular, there were the usual objections that dirty laundry would be aired (“What if they say bad things about us?”) and that prospective customers would be steered to competing companies (“What if they say good things about our competitors?”). It would be better, these execs felt, for the company’s initial foray into community to be via a safer route.

The marketing communications manager just didn’t have enough sway to keep things on track, so the community project changed. Rather than start with a customer-facing community, they’d provide a space for their global field service engineers. Some of these engineers were employees, and others were contractors, but they were all frustrated by an inability to find up-to-date documents and to share best practices with each other. Giving them a community space where they could easily access current documentation and hold topical conversations with each other seemed like the place to start.

Only it didn’t start, because the use case was now different, and dramatically so. Instead of a public customer community, they were now looking to create a private collaboration space. Sure, both concepts had some overlapping technological requirements (discussion areas, document repositories, profile pages), but these are vastly different types of business projects that fall within different business units, require different resources, and have different measures of success.

A Different Business Case

The marcomm person was still involved, although this new direction didn’t have the same appeal for her. It was turning into an IT project, when what had originally jazzed her was the ability to connect, and connect with, customers. So it was pretty much back to square one. (For example, she had previously pulled together a short list of technology vendors with community platforms that fit the bill. Now, though, she had to look at platforms that supported the added requirements from the new use case.)

But this new concept moved haltingly as well, since there were several concurrent technology initiatives rolling out that already had collaborative components. So the cry came up for further evaluation and analysis.

Where are They Now?

Still in the planning stages. The recent boom of social media has generated increased interest in a public customer community, so there are renewed efforts there. And the informational needs of the field service engineers remain imperfect, so improvements through social software are in the works there, too. What seems to be happening is a separation between the two projects.

So things are moving forward, and the marketing communications person feels confident that they’ll launch a customer community by mid-2010. But they’ve added to existing organizational friction, and they’ve lost a lot of momentum.

They’ve also lost an opportunity to be a market leader. In today’s increasingly competitive world, that can be a recipe for disaster.

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One Response to “A Recipe for Not Getting Your Community off the Ground”

Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 4) | Impact Interactions says:

June 16, 2011 at 11:36 am

[...] month I wrote about a practitioner in a marketing communications group whose B2B online customer community initiative was sidetracked [...]