Comments on: Developing switching costs within communities

By: PreznitBUsh

PreznitBUsh — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 10:35:39 +0000

Hi. I am a user of UB and YBM and was present for the migration. It had NOTHING to do with member profiles and content. The reason the switch was successful was that Cnet had attempted to overdesign the community, and data harvesting was offensively sophomoric. YBM won that fight mainly because it maintained absolutely anonymity (i would definitely NOT want any cross pollination between my FB, twitter and YBM accounts), completely edited out anything that distracted from the core user experience (which is pretty fast and loose) and there are NO transactions. There are no ads on YBM. THere is no point to YBM other to talk with complete impugnity. There is no profit. That’s precisely why we love it.

By: Allan

Allan — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:36:50 +0000

I really like the framework of thinking about members, content, member profiles and transactions as the four main pieces to a community. What is more sticky? Content or transactions?

By: TrueView, the Ryan TrueHealth POV

TrueView, the Ryan TrueHealth POV — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:36:44 +0000

Don’t Touch That Switch…

One aspect of relationship marketing that we’ve discussed a lot is the creation of online communities. There are lots of examples, such as patientslikeme.com out there. But once someone has joined a community, the battle is only half-won. The other……

By: Michael Hackney

Michael Hackney — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:29:28 +0000

Francois, I’ve been thinking about this topic lately so your post is well timed. In addition to the 4 pillars of successful communities, I wonder if there is a 5th pillar emerging – integration/bridging across communities?

For instance, my Facebook account is bridged to my Twitter account and these are both bridged to my blog (www.eclecticguy.com). Content I post in any of these locations is immediately shared across the other channels. I found this post of yours, in fact, because you have your blog updates bridged to your facebook activity list. Many of my friends and colleagues do this now in fact. This makes Facebook very sticky for me. Linkedin has taken this one step further with their release of “LinkedIn applications” last week – if I tag a blog post with “LinkedIn” it will show up on my LinkedIn profile. Since LinkedIn is a professional community, I use this feature to link my technical posts but not my personal posts.

If I were developing a commercial community, say like Amazon, I would make it easy for Amazon buyers/community members to bridge their other social sites in to Amazon. So, for instance, all book reviews that I post on my blog are posted to Amazon (or more likely, vice versa).

In many cases, there are overlaps between these communities – especially between “open” personal communities like Facebook and “closed” commercial communities like Amazon. It may seem counter intuitive but my observation has been that bridging these communities actually makes each stickier.