Community bubble…
With every company wanting to jump on the community bandwagon you see some pretty silly things happening these days.
One such funny community is the new P&G Tampax social network (ok, they don’t call it that way), which my partner Lois pointed out to me yesterday. Of course, coming from a company that calls Vocalpoint a community instead of a multi-level marketing effort, or their connect + develop effort a product innovation industry collaboration effort instead of a web-based idea box is not so surprising.
Heck, last week I met a CMO who called his mailing list a community.
And then there are the many people and companies who should set good examples and don’t - Seth Godin with his Tribes community to help him sell books, or various community platform vendors that set up communities in which they try to isolate their members instead of affiliating with one another and show community best practices, are just two examples of that.
Maybe one of these days we should create user-generated lists of best and worst community examples. That would be fun.
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August 20th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Tampax initiative is a media planning campaign, as brands like Adidas, Toyota, or Ogilvy, did using SecondLife. There’s no community creation or dialog effort in that. But there are companies that are messing with communities efforts like companies paying for advertising posts in blogs.
For VocalPoint, I do agree with you. The forum space is a shame (have a look at the forum replies).
It would be a great idea to share worst case studies. We could do that easily by seting up a wiki. Ready to go?
August 24th, 2008 at 5:45 am
Hi Francois, I just wanted to ask you a question about what you said
“And then there are the many people and companies who should set good examples and don’t - Seth Godin with his Tribes community to help him sell books, or various community platform vendors that set up communities in which they try to isolate their members instead of affiliating with one another and show community best practices, are just two examples of that.”
When you say they should set a good example and then dont, can you give specific examples of how the Tribes community set up by Seth, hasnt set a good example?