By: jwschlack

jwschlack — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 19:55:46 +0000

Hi Robert. I’m Julie Wittes Schlack from Communispace Corporation, and I found your blog posting to be both intellectually and emotionally provocative — intellectually, because I think you’ve raised some important questions about the difference between organic, self-forming communities and the “intentional” communities of the sort that we run; emotionally, because I think it also reflects some misconceptions about how we recruit for and conduct our communities. So let me first dispense with the latter, then get into the good challenges you’ve posed.
We do indeed recruit and learn a lot about members of our communities, both so that our clients (the sponsoring company) has some context for intepreting and acting upon the feedback of community members, and because we’ve found that this personal accountability helps to create a more respectful, higher trust relationship between community members. And we do periodically remove non-participating members, not because they’re “bad,” but because if they choose not to participate, while they may learn something from “lurking,” they’re frankly not providing any value to other members or to our client. However, we do not “moderate” (as in censor or in any way filter) member postings, and we certainly do not act as the buffer between our members and clients. On the contrary, our facilitation practices are explicitly designed to elicit ongoing, long-term engagement and honesty between members and the corporate sponsor, and have an extensive body of research demonstrating that this is precisely what occurs. If you were to ask any of our facilitators whether they “command and control” our members, they would tell you with polite amusement that most certainly do not.
In short, what we try to create is not so much “control” as dialogue, intimacy, and engagement, and have found the small size and private nature of the community to be an essential prerequisite to creating that kind of climate. In fact, when we’ve done both quantitative and qualitative comparisons to large, public “community” sites such as FlyerTalk, we find much higher participation rates (as a percentage of total “visitors”) in our private communities (i.e. a greater diversity of voices and number of contributions per members), much more “you” and “we” language (as opposed to purely “I” language), many more actionable suggestions, a higher average word count per posting, etc. The bottom line is that when consumers feel that they are in a genuine dialogue with the brand, when they feel heard, they engage more and with greater candor. And to your excellent distinction between a “genuine community” vs. a “dolled up panel,” our daily experience with members sharing intimate details of their lives, supporting one another both practically and emotionally, and most importantly, taking ownership of the community by initiating their own dialogues, surveys, brainstorms etc. (a practice that we actively encourage and reward) suggests that their experience is that of belonging to a genuine community.
I don’t mean to suggest that small, private “branded” communities are superior to self-forming, organic communities such as you find at SlashDot or SparkPeople. The latter are great forums for peer-to-peer advice giving and seeking, and by “mining” their content, companies can identify emerging trends, competitive threats, etc. But when the company’s objective is to achieve insight and the consumer’s objective is to have a voice, small and private communities can play a valuable role in meeting both sets of needs.
I do welcome your healthy cynicism — these are great questions to raise. If you’re looking for some solid research addressing some of these issues, I recommend downloading “Size Matters” and “WHY Size Matters” from our corporate website. And I do thank you for providing a forum in which to discuss them.

Comments on: eTribes and Emergent Community

By: jwschlack