Your community has TOO MANY features
- 23
- Jan
Image by: John Ragai
Shout out to the 100 attendees, DNN Corp, and CMS Wire who organized yesterday’s webinar on choosing the right online community platform for your organization. Clearly, online communities continue to be a hot topic for many organizations (note this recent story about Doximity attaining more members than the American Medical Association).
There were some really great questions asked at the end of the webinar, including: “Can you recommend any online community platforms that provide an end-to-end, comprehensive, enterprise solution?”
It would have been easy for me to just spout off the names a few of the bigger online community software packages, but I felt compelled to provide some advice that I think will serve the attendees far better in the long run, and here it is: Most communities have TOO MANY features. Don’t be lured by the siren’s call of an all-in-one, do-everything community platform sales pitch.
One of my new favorite lines to use during conference presentations is: “Raise your hand if you’ve ever used an online community that didn’t have enough features.” I’ve seen exactly zero hands go up in the four times I’ve had an opportunity to use this line. It normally elicits laughter, as many community managers know it’s true, even if they can’t convince the powers that be that it is.
You’re far better off focusing on a few highly visible, core features than spreading engagement around. When you have too many features in your community, you end up hiding your core focus in a less visible area of the community.
As additional evidence, consider the rise of simpler, limited-purpose applications like Snapchat and consider user attitudes towards enterprise applications like Sharepoint.
Moral of the story: Follow the K.I.S.S. principle, and keep your community simple.
Click here to get the slide deck of the webinar, and standby for links to wrap ups of the webinar from DNN and CMS Wire.
Hi Ben, thanks for the great post (and I appreciated the link to the story about Doximity). I always go back to the example of Craigslist. Here’s an online community that’s about as stripped-down as it gets, no fancy UI or bells and whistles, yet it boasts a long-standing, huge, and super-active community. Your post was a good reminder for when our eyes go to bright shiny tools that we remember to re-direct them back to the purpose of the community and the value it seeks to provide.
Megan, I wonder if Craigslist could have survived if it started today with that minimalist approach among much stronger competition. I don’t know, but it’s interesting to think about.
[…] If your AMS or CRM has a baked-in community platform, give it serious consideration before contracting with a vendor that will need to sync with your back office database. These platforms tend to be simple solutions compared to others in the market, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. […]