All Things Cahill

Why Most Online Communities Fail…

David Churbuck linked to the Ben Worthen story in the WSJ yesterday entitled “Why Most Online Communities Fail“.  David points out that a simple typo from a Deloitte powerpoint managed the ruin the story and deflect the discussion from the matter at hand to a moot discussion on percentages.

1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great way to get off on the right credibility foot. Worthen does the correction, but …

The point I’d like to make goes more to the point in Churbuck’s piece that will be overlooked - “This is bad research on a tired topic.”

You see, the thing that all of the social media gurus, wannabes, and willneverbes would have us believe is that community is easy. You build it and they will come.  The truth is so very far from there that if it was commonly known no marketer in his/her right mind would ever utter the words “let’s build a community, gang!” again.

Sounds harsh?  Well, it ought to.  There are way to many businesses committing to creating community development without the slightest thought of what the real ramifications of failure are.  And even worse, they judge the cost of creating their communities solely on the basis of what the servers, dev costs, etc. will be and routinely devote little or no resources to actually managing and developing that community.

I say it again, more clearly: a community will fail surely if you do not devote experienced people to building and moderating it.

Note that word, people.  I don’t say person.  And there’s a lot more that goes along with this.  There are ton of real, hard costs that you’re going to face in order to make a community successful.  Building in these terms isn’t development, it’s people attracting other people to your service, getting them committed, and giving them reasons to stay there.  This big myth is that communities build themselves.  When done right, it will look like they build themselves,  but there’s always someone helping the community get going.

This is where I see companies fall flat on their face time and time again (sorry, not gonna name names here, but I could).  They think that assigning a marketing intern to run the site they just poured a million in development and up front costs into, is going to be sufficient.  People come in once, if your lucky, look around, realize they’re essentially hanging out in an empty room and leave.  Eventually the company folds up shop, does a post mortem, fires the intern and promptly forgets every lesson they should have learned.  Then someone chimes in “hey gang, let’s build a user forum and share our brand.” Then the cycle starts all over again.

Most businesses have no business running communities.  They want to make “the brand more transparent” and in the end, they hurt the brand by creating a bad user experience that has nothing to do with their actual brand, but through association, it’s now taking the hit.

If you don’t have experts who can show you working communities they’ve built, and if you’re relying on consultants who aren’t cautioning you, you need to be very wary. Personally, I feel the best place to expose the brand to a community is through active sponsorship of existing communities.  You don’t need to own it, you get a ton of mileage for your buck, and the positive effects start right away, not a year from now when  your development cycle is done.

Think about it…why own a community when you can rent one…

More reading:

Helen Whitehead on Why Do Online Communities Fail? - a well thought out piece with some good advice.

R. Todd Stephens, Phd - making the point that communities struggle when there’s no good business reason to get involved.

C. David Gammel at High Context Consulting on the Three Reasons Branded Online Communities Fail

Update: Tom O’Brien at A Human Voice commented on the Churbuck post with probably the most important note of all “the community vendors were scrambling hard to pull the curtain back up..”  Darned straight, they have been scurrying to get the genie back in the bottle.  Tom’s own post - “Social Media Madness: Build it & they will come . . .” also puts the lie to to the maxim that brands need to develop communities.  As he puts it, the community often already exists, and “increasing brand value” isn’t their goal.

Tags: Ben Worthen, deloitte, media gurus, online communities, online community development, online community failure, wsj

Wordpress 2.6 - It’s a CMS, Baby!

I remember when I first setup Wordpress back in 2003, the old 1.x days, my comment was that “It’s just like a CMS (content management system) with most of the functionality removed.” Well, with the release of Wordpress 2.6, I can finally eat my words. It’s now simply a content management system, and a darned good one at that.

That’s right, content management system. To call it a blogging platform is to sell it short. It’s now all the features I expect to see in a simple content management system, and two that we do not expect to see: it is both easy to use and easy to maintain.

Is it Enterprise level software? No, probably not, although it is certainly scalable and customizable. But that doesn’t mean it’s not in use at corporations around the globe. I know of many that now rather than calling their Interwoven contractor will fire up a new WP install for certain needs.

So here is a run down of the new features that make the difference for me:

• Revision History: this was never a big deal to bloggers, as we generally are lone gunmen. However when you enter a multiple user environment, you need a fast and easy way to see who did what and when, plus the ability to revert to a previous version. This is a staple of the *big bad print cms editorial system* and has been a glaring hole in the WP system by my estimation.

• Image Editing: The previous version hinted at the auto resize capability of the system by offering thumb, medium or large image sizes for anything you uploaded. Now I can select the exact width I want for the image, assign any of the data I want, link it as I wish, all within a neat little flash app. Image editing in Wordpress.
  

  Image editing in Wordpress

• Image Resize: Now I can resize to any size I want (just upload the image, click “insert to post” then you can reopen the image by hovering over it in the editor, clicking the edit image that will appear on the image, and you’ll see you have complete resize options.
• Add Style Code to Image: Also, now I can edit style code directly into the image editor. This is the main reason that you always see my images aligned on this blog to the right, I never took the time to add a padding-right: 3px; to the style sheet, so I didn’t like the way it looked. These styles can now be added directly in the editor.
  
  
• Image Caption: Then there’s the image caption feature - again, I can just write in a caption and I’ve got an image caption. One of the little things, but it’s been missing from this (and many other cms systems) for a long time.
• More Edit Info In Editor: I can now at a glance see the last save time, last edited by and word count info. Also, I have direct link access to see comments, manage comments, manage all posts, manage categories, manage tags, and view drafts. Basically the stuff I need if I’m a production editor working on numerous posts, is right there, so I don’t have to go looking.
• Better Plugin Management: I love that they have separated my active plugins from my inactive plugins. Of course, it just highlights to me that if I am not using a plugin it should be removed.
• Gears Integration: Typically when we start to add so much functionality via a browser, performance starts to drop. I haven’t seen any issues, but Wordpress has added Gears support to handle this. Just click the “turbo” button in the far upper right hand corner.

The single biggest feature though, is one that will come in handy for the lone gunman blogger: they will now be able to do an automatic (single click) update for Wordpress when a new version comes out. That’s a huge feature, and will help the less technical stay up to date and secure.

So far, the only issue I’ve seen is that my Tag Suggest Plugin appears to have stopped working. A very small price to pay. I was able to update the site in about 10 minutes, most of which was spent downloading and uploading files. For the first time I did an autoupdate on the recently updated plugins, which was sweet.

Congratulations to the Automattic team and happy Blogging Content Managing to all!

(An after thought a day later: I should probably mention that I’ve got 10 high volume multiuser sites running on WP, where we use it as a CMS, some getting over 10 million visits a month. This update brought in the final bits the system needed in my estimation...)

Tags: Automattic, bloggin software, content management systems, Wordpress, wordpress 2.6, wordpress 2.6 review

MySQL Table Locking & Wordpress Scalability

I ran into an interesting issue recently, and since I had so much trouble finding a solution, I’ll post about it.

We have a very large Wordpress site with somewhere around 32,000 posts. Sometime during may the database (MySQL 5.10) started to randomly crash, taking along with it the Apache server, etc. Every time the crashes occurred, we’d find that the number of users had climbed over the available processes, in this case, 501.

We went through a whole host of possible causes, most notably a quick cleanup of some rather dubious plugins, etc. Then we upgraded our wp-cache to Wp Super Cache, which has been tremendous. Our standard 30-40 mysql connections dropped immediately to an average of 2 or 3. Even though we still had the random database crashes, now the Apache process would continue to run, often serving pages throughout the outage. Actually the whole thing was quite astonishing.

In the end, our DBA Glenn Nadeau suggested we take a look at the size of our tables. Sure enough, our wp-posts table had climbed to 32,000 rows. Apparently when you query over 30,000 rows, MySQL will lock the tables. Hence our issue.

After a little searching we found the get_posts() function was being used in one of our templates to return pretty much everything from the posts table, even though all but 20 results were being discarded in the next line of the script. A simple date limit on the query brought it’s execution time down from 35 seconds to milliseconds.

get_posts() is a standard Wordpress function that we often use in our templates. Be very careful if you have a large site with tons of posts that you limit the query. As they say, be careful what you ask for, you may just get it.

Tags: database problem wordpress, get_posts(), mysql, mysql table locking, Wordpress, wordpress scalability

The Shine is off Social Networking

Say it ain’t so, Joe! Over the past few weeks, it’s begun to look like Social Networking, the current darling of the conference and consultant set, might have jumped the shark.  I personally would peg the exact point where it went careening off track as the day that Waste Management (the guys that probably run your local honey truck) opened their own social networking site.

But it goes far beyond that.  Earlier this week Om Malik wrote a very interesting piece showing that social networking may have flattened out, or even may be decreasing. He notes:

Today there are numbers out from comScore that indicate plateauing growth for the big two — MySpace and Facebook — in the U.S. Last week, Revision3 canceled “SocialBrew,” an online video show dedicated to social networking. Meanwhile, Monster killed its Tickle social networking service (first reported in April by TechCrunch), following closely on the heels of CondeNast’s shuttering of Flip and Verizon’s decision to close up its virtually unknown network, which had managed to garner a mere 18,000 members. (Verizon has shifted its community to Facebook.)

And these just might be the tip of the iceberg, for there are way too many me-too networks out there failing to find the traction, and hence the volume, needed to grow their revenues. The lack of monetization will only accelerate this process.

I’ve also been detecting a subtle change in the “conversations” on Twitter lately, with some brave few actually taking a stand against the social networking Kool-Aid.  In one telling argument, it came down to a final comment from the prime Kool-Aid drinker that “You just never got Social Networking,” reminding my of my favorite line from a movie I dearly love, The Duellists, in which the lead character, D’Hubert, (a Napoleonic era officer who has served from Spain to Russia and back) is condemned with the single statement “You never loved the Emperor.”  Indeed, one might as easily be condemned for “Not being Politically Correct,” or whatever the actual flavor of the moment is.

Also, I find the current “Proactive Customer Support” wherein companies monitor social networking apps to create a two tier service network, in which the middle to upper income have a vastly different support experience than the lower middle to poor do.  Think about “Comcast Cares” on Twitter, a Comcast rep, who actively searches out support issues to help fix them.  I’ll bet he’s finding most of the problems are centered in Bel Aire, not in Compton.

Social Networking wasn’t invented by the current crop of Powerpoint wielding wannabes, and it’s been around a lot longer than most would suggest.  Honestly, I see it actually predating the internet, going back to the days of computer bulletin board services (Do you remember them?).  Most of the basic fundementals of Social Networking were really polished in online forums, on IRC, and in the first Instant Messaging Apps.  It’s not utterly new, in most cases, this is just a better presentation.

Some general Social Networking notes:

• “Join the Conversation” - I’m growing tired of hearing this.  If you already aren’t talking to your customers, then maybe there’s a reason.
• Just because Facebook says we’re friends, it doesn’t mean I will loan you money…
• Why is it the GuruVangelistPerts on Social Networking seem to Twitter from bars or about going to bars so often?

What is new, is that there is now a widespread understanding of Social Networking and it’s overall importance in both web design in particular and marketing in general.  I realize many readers may be rather upset at my saying the Emperor has no clothes, but indeed, that is not what I am saying. I am saying it’s a waste of time to talk about the clothes, rather than the more substantive issues about the Emperor, like taxes, etc.  When the medium is the subject of the message, there is a problem with that medium.

I’ve said it before, I say it again here.  Social Networking and Social Media are not ends unto themselves.  They are aspects of good web design, and should be employed as such.  To use Social Media for Social Media’s sake is a waste of time.  There is a limit to the number of Social Networks I want to be a part of, and I personally would prefer to have more in common with my fellow users than simple ownership of a computer.  Niche communities are the way to go…as Om so brilliantly notes.

Tags: comscore, condenast, facebook, kool aid drinker, social networking service, social networking site, techcrunch, twitter, waste management

Techcrunch Says Wordpress a Massive Security Risk

(The link to the article is lower in this post, to ensure the proper text appears in the Techcrunch trackback…)

Techcrunch yesterday featured an article by Nik Cubrilovic with the salacious title “Wordpress Security Issues Lead To Mass Hacking. Is Your Blog Next?“  - from that article:

Due to its popularity as a blogging platform, Wordpress has become a prime target for hackers looking to take over blogs for search-engine optimization (SEO) of other sites they control, traffic-redirection and other purposes. Recently there have been a spate of automated attacks which take advantage of recently discovered security vulnerabilities in Wordpress.

To date, Wordpress has been keeping up with the security holes by releasing updates within a few days of new exploits being found, but in the past few days new exploits have appeared that nobody seems to have answers for.

Okay, that kind of talk gets my interest.  Funny thing, when I was talking with the Automattic guys (who develop Wordpress) yesterday, no mention was made of any new security vulnerabilities.  So I had a look at the stuff he cites  as “the past couple days” and the issues are all over a year old, and affect out of date versions of the software, and are remedied in current releases.

So we have a situation in which one of two things is happening:

• This is a “hit job” on Automattic by Techcrunch for reason or reasons unknown - if so, shame on you…
• Or…there are vulnerabilities which Techcrunch did not identify so as to allow Wordpress to come up with a fix.  If this is the case, I applaud their handling of the issue.

Either way, Techcrunch in general, and Nik Cubrilovic in  particular need to clarify the existence of new security holes, and they need to do it fast.

Tags: Automattic, Michael Arrington, Nik Cubrilovic, security issues, techcrunch, Wordpress, Wordpress Security

Social Media - Shark Jumping?

One of the outcomes of my testing of Twitter lately is that I’ve come to question whether or not Social Media has jumped the shark (props to David Churbuck who tweeted on social media jumping the shark this morning - I initially left the attribution out to save the fall out, but since he linked, no need to save him…)

What I am finding is that most of the people I am finding in my general circle on Twitter are social media types. That’s to say, folks that attend a lot of conferences, and have generally drank fully of the social media Kool-Aid. The thing that calls it all into question for me is the number of people who are generally ex-online marketing folks now using strange titles like “Social Media User Guru” or something equally ludicrous. It reminds me of a networking group I once attended that turned out to be a room full of sales people, each hoping to sell something, and none realizing there weren’t any real customers there.

Now I’m not certain that this isn’t a function of my very own profile (apparently in Twitter, like objects attract each other, while differing opinions repel with remarkable force). It could be that it’s become like a bad cocktail party with people that know each other standing in one corner, doing their best to ignore the other strange groups.

One thing I know for certain - when the consultants move in so heavily to a space, such as they have in social media (and believe me, there are tons of newly minted “social media consultants” out there), it denotes a fundamental change in the ecosystem.

So where to from here? I think we move on in the direction which I have always said social media should go. It’s not an end to an end, or even a standalone solution in my mind. This is simply good web design, online marketing practice or branding. Call it what you will, let’s just lose the Social Media moniker and take a more holistic viewpoint.

(For the record, I’ve been doing niche community work since 1996, was one of the first bloggers, and date back to the days of Compuserve accounts that came with user numbers, not usernames. I too have fully drank of the Kool Aid, but I’m not so ready to take my advice from those who haven’t been dancing the dance for more than a couple years.)

Tags: conferences, good web design, guru, kool aid, marketing, media consultants, shark jumping, social media guru, twitter

The Right Medium for the Message

Having used Twitter for a few weeks now I’ve come to the realization that it’s a viable communications means. It’s just that I’d never realized the appropriate messages to fit in that medium, which are short comments or conversations. I think of it as yelling over the cubicle wall at the folks around me. It’s good for a short blast, but any substantial conversation needs to move to a more appropriate communication means, be that a blog, an email, IM, the phone, or even the dreaded meat space.

There’s one usage I’m still coming to grips with and I think it’s a good one, the use of hashtags. This allows you to Tweet using a #myhashtag and then that tag is picked up and aggregated by Hashtags.org where you can go and see a stream of any tweets with that hashtag in them. This has a tremendous potential impact on niche communities. Think of a community of saltwater fly fishermen, who can use their phones to send a short tweet from the water, noting that the fish didn’t come in on the tide, or that their hitting on a particular fly. Or how about “the bluefish are blitzing at Sagamore Beach”? Tremendously useful…

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Other mashups with Twitter I question. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts from BrightKite noting the exact address someone is at. I absolutely don’t want to be reporting my whereabouts via my cell phone, I have enough people trying to track me as it is. However, on the face of it, think of that group of saltwater fly fishermen again. They’d probably want to know where their friends are and be able to catch up. Well, at least you’d think that, but the my experience tells me the exact opposite, they’re more territorial than wolverines, and absolutely would take the locations of their favorite spots with them to the grave rather than devulge them to anyone.

Think about how hash tags could be used at a major event, like, say the Kentucky Derby, which is a multiday affair.  You could use has tags to aggregate what everyone is saying, and also to direct them to the events you want, such as your brand sponsored cocktail party.  “Meet at the ShillCo Pavilion for mojitos…”  If I were planning a major marketing event, I’d definitely be thinking how to incorporate this, provided I could be assured they’re be enough Twitter users around (and of course I’d tie it in with a blog, email, etc.).

That said, there are communities that BrightKite would fit nicely into.  Think of Crafters at a Craft Fair, or perhaps members of the same car club at a Car Meet.  You know you’re buddies arrived, and you can meet up.

I think that Twitter is hurting the blogs though. Now it seems to me that rather than linking on a blog, people are sending out a tweet about a good post. The truth is that blog links have legs, and tweets have very limited range, only to your followers, and there, only to the followers who are actually looking at the screen at that time. Twitter is kind of like a stock ticker, the information fades fast. I really only see trackbacks from sploggers now.

The diaspora that’s hit online media, with so many disparate tools, has got to stop.  Segmentation and tribalism won’t work for us.  We’ve got to move towards aggregating, not compartmentalizing.

Tags: brightkite, conversations, flickr, fly fishermen, hastags.org, mashups, niche communities, twitter

The Web 2.0 Paradox

As readers know, I’ve been testing Twitter.  It’s fun, but for me the jury is still out.

One of the things I’m noticing is the preponderance of New Media Gurus inhabiting Twitter.  And inevitably, many feel the need to constantly evangelize on the issues of Web 2.0.  News flash: if you have to talk in broad terms about Web 2.0, Social Networking or Social Media, you’ve probably already missed the boat.  This is not some abstract concept that is coming down the pipe someday, it’s a trend that’s here.  If you’re a designer or a developer, it is not a trend, it’s a wrench your toolbox to be employed where it fits.  No more and no less.

Let me say that more clearly: the whole social networking thing is an extension of web design and development, not a radical departure from it.  It is an iteration, one more bit to add on and be aware of.  Think of it as a stop on the bus route of development.  This is all an evolutionary step, as will be the *next big thing*.

When I see “new communication tools” like Twitter, I have one standard that I apply.  If the discussion in the tool is mostly about the tool, it is a failed experiment.  I am not currently certain if Twitter has risen above that level of primordial ooze yet.  As John C. Dvorak noted, I don’t really want to know that you’re having a cheese sandwich for lunch…

Tags: abstract concept, cheese sandwich, communication tools, failed experiment, john c dvorak, media gurus, primordial ooze, radical departure, Social Networking, twitter, Web Design

Epic Post - How to Monitor Social Media for Free

Okay, we all know that social networks are out there and that we should be making use of them.  But how do you monitor what’s going on in the vast ecosystem of Twitterverses, MySpaceDoms and FacebookVilles?

David Churbuck has been doing just that for Lenovo for the past two years and he’s sharing the lessons learned in this post: “Try to Detect It” which I consider a must read for any web marketing pro or business owner/senior manager.

Free: yup. It costs nothing to detect the chatter about your company. There are two solid solutions for blog search – perhaps you’ve heard of Google? Thought so. Google Blog search is a good thing. And then there is Technorati, which sort of defined the space. Both are great tools, but you can automate searches of specific keywords and phrases and then syndicate those searches as RSS feeds out into a blog reader such as Bloglines or (in my case) Google Reader. Then you just need to remember to scan the blog reader a couple times every day.

The best part is that it’s true, unlike so many “Free’ claims.  You can measure a lot of this stuff in some very novel ways.  I’ve been doing some of this back channel to detect mentions of some new sites I’ve just launched and it works.  Plus it’s always great to walk into a meeting armed with facts, especially when everyone else is essentially unarmed.

The media landscape has changed, if you hadn’t noticed.  Trade magazines are dinosaurs and if you’re relying on them to tell you what’s going on in your industry, you’re woefully out of touch.  Not only should you be monitoring what’s said on websites, you’ve got to find a way to monitor what’s happening in the social networks like Twitter, when product talk can affect you without your ever knowing it.  If you’re not monitoring, now is the time to start and Churbuck has given you an excellent primer to jump start your efforts.

Tags: bloglines, business owner, dinosaurs, google, great tools, lenovo, marketing, media landscape, online marketing, social networks, technorati, trade magazines, twitter

Thoughts after a week of Twitter

After slapping Twitter around for the past year, I thought it was about time for me to shut my mouth and actually try it. So after a week, here are my initial impressions.

First off, communications through Twitter are by their nature somewhat superfluous. I’ve really only had one discussion that’s actually meant anything. My impression is that it’s basically the Internet equivalent of the CB Radio. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.

The means of communication is totally different. Look at the stunts Web A Lister Jason Calacanis; as he basically uses Twitter as his personal marketing platform.  He’s offering a Mac Book Air to be raffled off if he is “followed” by 20,000 people. He’s been using Twitter to bombard sites, move articles on Digg, etc. The other day he flooded UStream with people as he offered via Twitter to give a way a GPS unit. I was there, it was hysterical - the chat window was rolling so fast it couldn’t be read. He actually had to tell everyone to stop using it. But the real point is this: if he’d used any other communication means it would not have worked. If he email me, or worse, called, and asked me to go there for a chance to win a GPS I’d have reported him to his ISP for spamming. But for some reason, spamming seems to be okay here.

I’m going to chock it up to the bleeding edge nature of Twitter. I still don’t get it, but at least now I can see uses. However, I’m a results oriented kind of guy. I’m betting I find I don’t have time for this in my life.

This will really work when it’s teamed with groups.  Simply following a couple hundred people increases the signal to noise ratio to a point that it’s almost unusable.  However, it could come in handy when working with team members, or extended communities like a club.  Groups would cut the signal to noise ration down and make it useable.

For now, it seems like a place where A Listers like Calacanis and Steve Gillmor flood the Tweetwaves and make it tough to use.  I’ll have to narrow down my “follows.”

Tags: cb radio, club groups, gps unit, mac book, means of communication, signal to noise ratio, twitter