Blog Posts About: worstpractices

Wow, interesting things from community people are just rolling off the presses lately. Derek Powazek is leaving JPG Magazine and 8020 Publishing (the companies he founded) - due to a disagreement with the partners. It's so sad to see someone work so hard and be so passionate about a community project only to see it controlled by someone else. His passion made it successful, just like Matt Haughey at MetaFilter.

JPG Magazine is one of the community-based businesses that I cite most. It's a real-world photography magazine that is made of contributions from the community. The community creates the photos and votes for them to appear in the magazine. A well crafted community mobilization strategy if there ever was one.

Derek's explanation of the situation is a case study in how partnerships can go wrong - and serves as his way of saying goodbye to the community he developed over three years. If you're an entrepenuer, go read it now.

If it’s any help to other entrepreneurs, here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Make no assumptions when it comes to roles and responsibilities. Like my dad says: “Someone’s gotta call quittin’ time.�?
2. Communication between partners is mandatory. And you cannot communicate with someone who is not communicating with you.
3. Decisions aren’t decisions if you have to keep making them. Set on the course and stick to it. If you keep talking about things that have already been decided, nothing will ever get done.
4. When someone says one thing, but acts in a contradictory way, you have a choice between believing their words or believing their deeds. Believe their deeds.
5. Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, “You don’t want that,�? what they really mean is, “I don’t want you to have that.�?
6. Don’t stay where you’re not wanted, respected, or happy. Even if it’s your company.

Derek is a long-time community professional - he wrote a book called Design for Community in 2001 and has been a champion in the community world for longer than that. His wife, Heather Champ is the community manager at Flickr and collaborator on JPG too. I wish them both the best as I'm sure this is not the best of their days. I'm sure they will be on to greener pasture soon enough.

Darren Barefoot pointed me to a great example of how companies should not respond to criticism in blog comments. He wrote a critical post on the email newsletter company Constant Contact and his readers pointed him to competitors in comments. Then, nearly 1 year later, this entry received 3 comments within 10 minutes, all from "people" touting their positive experiences with Constant Contact. Here's an example:

The thing is, their comments were traceable back to the company (as Darren's red arrows above illustrate). There is a clever person, sitting at a desk at Constant Contact headquarters, adding multiple fake comments to entries like Darren's.

Darren explains...

Marketing lessons? Well, they should be obvious:

• Never lie. You’re going to get caught. Constant Contact should have just left a comment explaining the advantages of their service over the competition, plans for new features, and so forth.
• Join the conversation, don’t try to spin it.
• If you’re going to lie (and you surely shouldn’t), don’t be stupid about it. Understand how the Web works, and that if you comment from your desk at Constant Contact headquarters, that you may be traceable. And I’m no l33t hax0r–the evidence is right there in my notification email from WordPress.

This reminds me of Visible Technologies, that I wrote about here . They have touted their "thousands of personas registered with online forums" that can be used to balance negative/critical discussions. Maybe Constant Contact should have teamed up with them so that their lying would not have been as traceable. A match made in heaven .

My message: When it comes to dealing with your customer "community" in a responsible and productive way, there are no shortcuts. If you try to take the easy route, you are taking a big risk because you may end up creating more negative feelings and press that you ever imagined. Be real, be honest, be a person.

Case in point, this entry. I am telling my small part of the online world that Constant Contact appears to be making pathetic and dishonest attempts to balance criticism - and proving that Darren may have made the best decision in choosing a competitor, in his case, Campaign Monitor.

Aside: I think Constant Contact's tactic is called "astroturfing", derived from the brand of artificial grass used on sports fields. Artificial grass - articificial grassroots campaigns - I think you get it. More on Wikipedia.