Richard Millington from Feverbee is extremely knowledgable about online communities and I like a lot of what he has to say. That’s why I was surprised when I saw his recent headline “Why Content-Driven Community Strategies Are Flawed“.
Granted, Richard’s post was inspired by a problematic plan from a client he consulted on – their plan was to create great content to attract people to visit the site and then include forums and other community elements. Voila, a community!
Can you spot the problems here?
Absolutely right, tacking community on to content is not going to result in successful, engaged conversations, but overall the post seemed down on content and for me it trivialised just how hard (and expensive) it is to build a successful community.
I wanted to redirect on the points that content is too competitive to be of use online and that unique communities are easy to create.
Content is essential for online strategies
Richard states “content is ridiculously competitive and people have a limited amount of time. There is far too much content on almost every topic on the internet”.
Well yes, but get over it. I don’t think any online brand or marketing strategy should be without content. Any SEO person will tell you it’s important (and explain why) and likewise avoiding competition is about finding a niche topic and opportunities to dominate within it.
It’s not easy to create a community
Richard says that it’s easier to create unique community than unique content. But it isn’t, for the simple reason he goes on to say later… you need to “attract people to a community that want to participate in a community.”
Yes people might group within a simple forum but usually for a reason, and that reason is to discuss a topic, which leads me to my final thought….
Content and community strategy has gotten confused
The roles of content and community have gotten confused. You can have content without community and you can have a community without content but – and here’s the fun part- if you have a thriving community the community BECOMES the content. That’s why Google ranks online message boards and forums so highly, because of the content contained within those topic threads, which is often judged to be useful content to non-members of those communities.
My greatest fear is that a brand would interpret a dismissal of content as a great excuse to avoid the labour/cost investment in online content and hope that it’s enough to just build a community place then people will spontaneously turn up and start hanging out. Community building too is hard.
Recommended Reading:
Tempero on Google+
