Virtual Community Management--ongoing research

Who wants a virtual community? I do. Who wants to maintain it? Not me.

Online communities seem to be the hottest, newest thing to do online. Popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have created an internet buzz about the possibilities of creating virtual communities. But, just creating the community isn’t enough to ensure its success.

This Business Week article http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2008/id20080623_926972.htm?campaign_id=rss_techdiscusses just that: the maintenance and success rates of virtual communities designed for specific groups. Maria Giudice of San Francisco design company Hot Studio is a builder and a consultant for an online community. She says that just be cause you can build one, doesn’t mean you really need one, "All clients start out saying they want a community, but who's going to manage it once it's built?" she asks. "You can't just put up a community and expect that it'll magically run itself."

Web designers must do a lot of research into the community needs in order to create a virtual space that best suits what the users want. Maybe users think they want a virtual community for everyone to share information, but what they are really looking for is a home to network multiple sites that are used independently. Until the web designer studies what the users want the virtual space for, they can’t build a space that will actually suit the user’s needs.

Librarians recently have been discussing the same situation—innovative websites or virtual communities that don’t fit the user group are rarely successful, so librarians spend a lot of time researching their patrons in order to design a site that best supports what the local user wants.

The big philosophy here is “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” Web 2.O sites are flashy, complex, and dynamic--users see other sites that do virtual communities well, then think that their community needs the same resources. Each virtual community has idiosyncrasies just like every world-community, and no two will be alike. Just echoing what other online communities do will not guarantee that yours will be supported.

As the Business Week article notes, management of virtual communities are expensive in time and resources, so it is important to be sure that the community can be built and maintained, and is really suited to what the specific users want. Not only should the online community be designed and implemented with user goals in mind, the community must be adaptive to the change of user goals over time. Online communities will wither and change, so the virtual space must be able to be adapted to suit the changing needs of its patrons. People seeking to build and sustain a virtual community, including librarians seeking Web 2.0 for their libraries, need to maintain a connection to the community in order to adapt the virtual space to what users are actually doing. Just building a community isn’t enough, it takes constant evaluation of the users and the virtual space in order to maintain a successful online community.