In the community management field there are, as you’d expect, a number of blogs and communities to help you grow and manage your community. The interesting thing is though that in my experience of these sites, the vast majority of them use the words community to mean discussion forum.
Now don’t get me wrong, discussion forums are great. I’m a member of dozens and during my decade or so working online I’ve built, managed or moderated probably around 15 of them myself. As an end user they’re a great way to find out information in the topic area and generally waste a lot of time chewing the fat with likeminded people in your field. It’s safe to say I spend more time on forums than I do on other social media such as Facebook or Twitter.
So you might be wondering why I’m writing this post if I love forums so much. Well you see, whilst they’re fantastic from an end users perspective, from an organisational perspective they often fail to hit the mark. So here are 5 reasons why you should look for some other mechanism for helping your customers out.
- They’re very difficult to monetise – As any community manager will tell you, you don’t really run a forum to make money. You can stick advertising on the site, but people don’t visit to click ads, they visit to discuss things with other members. You can try premium membership, but again finding enough buyers to represent a good ROI is tough. Nine times out of ten your forum will suck money out of you.
- They’re a time sink – Forums take up a whole lot of time. In the early days when they’re new and fresh you need to spend heaps of time getting things off the ground. It’s very easy for a forum to become a 24/7 labour of love, and without that you will encounter opposition from managers afraid that people will say or do something to damage the brand whilst you’re not ‘on the clock’.
- They lack a purpose – I spoke with a large organisation recently about their community plans and they wanted a forum to allow stakeholders to share information. That’s far too fuzzy a purpose as it then becomes impossible to measure a successful instance of such sharing, and therefore impossible to tell if you’re getting a return on the time and money you’re investing into your community.
- They lack a commercial focus – This chimes with #3 really, because if you lack a social purpose, it’s very difficult to then measure how your forum is actually helping the business. If you lack that, then as before, it becomes tough to convince senior management that what you’re doing actually has a point to it.
- Metrics are weak – The traditional metrics of a discussion forum are akin to chasing likes or followers on Facebook and Twitter. Ok so you have new members or x number of posts, so what? For many that is the extent of their measurement, and more posts/members is translated into success, when really it is little of the sort.
All of this seemed typified by a conversation I had with a large organisation recently about their community building plans. They had their heart set on a discussion forum where stakeholders could ‘share ideas and best practice’. It’s the kind of fuzzy purpose that can see forums consume lots of your time and energy with very little gain at the end of it.
There are lots of community building tools out there, be they shared Wikis or idea markets. Whatever choice you make though, look at how the business will benefit first of all and only then look for the tool you use to best implement it. The ubiquity of discussion forums can often make companies think that’s all that’s available and building one and praying will do the trick.
Hi Adi,
Interesting post. If I may I would like to respond to the points you raised (full disclosure: I am biased because I run a community that is hosted on a forum platform).
1. They are difficult to monitise – Depends on the topic of the community, but generally I would disagree with this. On the contrary, communities of particular genres attract focused advertising from advertisers/companies looking to target the particular demographic of the community in question. You can equate that to a car manufacturer looking to target their ads to programmes such as "Fifth Gear" for example. This targeted advertising can be very lucrative for the community owner.
2. They're a time sink – Any community building worth it's salt is going to be a time sink, no matter what platform the community is hosted up on.
3. They lack a purpose – If the purpose is fuzzy at the beginning, then the community will not succeed. This goes for any community.
4. They lack a commercial focus – I agree with you that this is tied into number 3, therefore the purpose of the community must be established first. If there is no purpose (mission statement/goal) for the community then why would any org attempt to start a community anyway?
5. Metrics are weak – Not necessarily. It depends on the goals of the community owners. My metrics are taken from the forum software and Google Analytics.
Hi Sue,
Thanks for the detailed comment, much appreciated. My take on it is mainly from a company wanting to engage their community of customers/stakeholders in some way.
Too many such organisation in my opinion start a forum with the aim of just providing somewhere for customers to chat. There may be a loose aim around providing customer support, but that is seldom tied into any distinct measures around how many successful customer problems are solved on the site.
Of course there are some that don't fall into this trap (Cisco for instance are very good).
I'm interested in your response to #1, because whilst some communities I've used/worked on have had dedicated sponsors (as opposed to generic Adsense type stuff), none have ever earnt enough to pay the owners/staffs salary. Cover costs for sure, but that's often been it (and many haven't even done that).
It all kinda ties in together though. I believe any community should have a social purpose (ie to solve a customers problem), and you can then use that to ascertain a financial purpose (ie to solve x number of problems and thus pay for its existence).
Having metrics around # of posts or page views does nothing to help you understand the organisational importance of the community. I've been in boardrooms where I've rightly been asked 'so what?' when I tell them traffic stats or # of posts on our forums. To make these communities commercially viable there need to be commercial metrics used.
Gartner have produced some nice thoughts around some basic principles of social media this week. I gave my overview of them here if that'd be of interest http://adigaskell.org/2012/08/31/the-6-p…
I know from speaking to you whilst at The Environment Site that it was often a labour of love, with none of the rewards required to make it a full time job, but plenty of the hassles to make it a 40 hour a week endeavour (and then some).
Don't get me wrong, I do really think discussion forums have a big part to play in many social media based endeavours, but when they are the entire social media endeavour it's a real challenge to extract meaning from what you're doing.
I've moderated a few forums in the past and even just that was a lot of work.
I'm a bit lazy and like to do as little as possible and get the best return, rather than do lots of work for the same return as the thing that allows me to do little work.
Great post Adi, thanks for reconfirming some of the points I thought about forums.
They are great to be involved in sometimes and provide a lot of insight, but running one is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
Some forums are knowledgeable and you will learn a lot from it.