Marketing Magazine published my article this week covering Why Branded Communities Wither Away, Plus 5 Ways To Prevent Digital Death.
Here’s a snippet:
While ghost towns in this world forever blot the landscape, dead online communities are quietly taken down. This is the survivorship bias. We only hear about the success stories.
For every GiffGaff, Get Into Gardening (Homebase), and Be The Pro (Bosch) there are hundreds more failures like VTravelled (Virgin), Bluenity (AirFrance), VAIO Nation (Sony), BakeClub (Lurpak), Digital Nomads (Dell), and Soup (BBC) .
Here’s a simple rule, if more than half the activity in a community is generated by paid staff, it’s heading for a digital death.