Private online communities offer secure spaces for customer intimacy programs, product innovation summits, and peer-peer idea exchanges. Small groups of people with common interests come together to share information and support complex decisions, such as who are the best lawyers in a specific legal niche, or the proper steps for installing and rolling out a complex H.R. software package, or where to train employees on presentation skills. Key benefits for their sponsoring organizations include generating ideas and information that fuel business innovation and customer satisfaction. As businesses and individuals discover the strong operational returns they can get from these communities, they are creating a quiet but powerful social business revolution.
I don’t quite agree with you on this one. We all like the idea, but I found that in reality private communities frequently fail because people don’t want to engage with yet another online community, even when it should be there interest. Think of how many Intranets have “knowledge sharing groups” that have virtual tumbleweed rolling through them. And I’m not talking about small companies but of the intranets of some of the world’s largest organizations with loads of users who share the same skills, interests and problems. Private communities should work – but unfortunately most of the time they don’t. In part I think this is due to search. People want to find issues through search and intranet search engines cannot match the accuracy of Google nor are they the first place where people look – they search through Google first.
@timolue I actually agree with you on multiple levels – the search piece is huge, and if community vendors focused on that funtionality as paramount, that would definitely help. I also think communities fail because the of “if we build it they will come” syndrome which I still see every day (sigh) – they are unsupported, there’s no community management, there’s also no defined purpose. (“Networking” is not a goal – nobody wants yet another place to network, as you said.) I do, however think that for certain organizations who do it right, private communities have HUGE value as a FILTER – now that everyone on on public social networks everywhere, and the noise is deafening, I think private communities can only rise in value when people realize that MAYBE they can find the signal out of the noise inside them.
Maddie Grant, CAE and Lindy Dreyer are strategic consultants at ICF Ironworks.
We also manage the SocialFish blog, the biggest industry social media blog for associations and nonprofits. We have regular bloggers writing for us on social strategy, implementation, social theory, social business and lots of other topics that interest us and push our industry forward. Every author's posts are their own, and none represent the views of ICF Ironworks or ICF International.
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Thanks for covering this article! Appreciate it.
I don’t quite agree with you on this one. We all like the idea, but I found that in reality private communities frequently fail because people don’t want to engage with yet another online community, even when it should be there interest. Think of how many Intranets have “knowledge sharing groups” that have virtual tumbleweed rolling through them. And I’m not talking about small companies but of the intranets of some of the world’s largest organizations with loads of users who share the same skills, interests and problems. Private communities should work – but unfortunately most of the time they don’t. In part I think this is due to search. People want to find issues through search and intranet search engines cannot match the accuracy of Google nor are they the first place where people look – they search through Google first.
@timolue I actually agree with you on multiple levels – the search piece is huge, and if community vendors focused on that funtionality as paramount, that would definitely help. I also think communities fail because the of “if we build it they will come” syndrome which I still see every day (sigh) – they are unsupported, there’s no community management, there’s also no defined purpose. (“Networking” is not a goal – nobody wants yet another place to network, as you said.) I do, however think that for certain organizations who do it right, private communities have HUGE value as a FILTER – now that everyone on on public social networks everywhere, and the noise is deafening, I think private communities can only rise in value when people realize that MAYBE they can find the signal out of the noise inside them.