One of the most important 'answers' in years?

This is about what happened to a company with regard to its online community... an amazing bit of perspective. I doubt there are many of us who are big fans of the company mentioned here, but that's likely irrelevant. Wow... this tidbit is something significant, to be ignored at great peril.

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/cardinal-sin-of-community-management.html

Thank you to the person who tipped me off about this article.

Forget about the grand scope of it, this even applies to my own estate. Words worth heeding for a lot of us.

Edit: thanks go to Kamilah Hauptmann for tipping me off about it ~ had to get permish before I could say

I'll sit on top of M if you force him to read it...

This is a great write-up. I really hope we don't see something similar from Philip, a couple years down the road.

It is a nice piece and all, but it doesn't completely address the issue. That is apparent in the comments about trolls.

The vast majority of trolls do not start out as trolls, but as good, happy customers. The stereotype that a troll is nothing more than a chronically unhappy person who endlessly complains about everything all the time is only applicable in the most rare of cases. The cardinal sin of not listening creates the trolls just as much as anything. Just like the masses of nameless, faceless, silent, and disenfranchised users created by not listening, there are some who go the other way; instead of being silent about their unhappiness and just leaving, they become vociferous and tenacious. Ignoring either type of customer has its perils. Ignore the vocal ones, and they will cause other people to go away, because the very act of ignoring them actually gives their words credence. If their words didn't have any credence, it should be exceptionally easy to dispell them with a strong showing of facts and evidence. Sometimes, engaging the trolls gives you the opportunity to communicate about the issues to others to their benefit.

Aye, far from perfect... but I was surprised and pleased to see that listening really did make a difference. Perhaps listening, with a wee bit of 'doing' also...

Also, the stark honesty about how their goals changed, and how they didn't mesh up with the early adopter goals any more. Wow.

And very true, one person's troll is often another person's defender of the truth. I doubt very many people wake up in the morning with any intent to be a 'troll' (though certainly a few people do).

Desmond... LL does listen... but only to the top 10% of its customers as Pink said lol
the VAST majority have no voice in anything except if we will tell people in RL to stay away from SL...

I kinda hope we do, the other option is worse: Linden Labs sells itself to some third party with a grand vision for 'actualizing market innovations' - destroys the whole thing, fires all the people who were promised jobs in the transaction as soon as the promise date is up, makes the work environment hostile to the rest, and tanks the whole project in the end in order to rip out one line of code and use it for a software application built to ship shoes...

Lets hope the Lindens are around long enough to have to own up to their own mistakes, that they don't get to sell out and blame someone else first.

In my not-to-distant past, I was in a similar community building and management role, and the value of listening to our customers was not lost on me. We regularly engaged the players of the game, listened to their concerns, and responded, even to the "trolls". As a result, we built a community that was exceptionally strong and vibrant, and persists to this day.

Thus, it comes as no great revelation to me that listening AND communicating just .. works. I've lived it.

I hope it doesn't take them that long to figure it out.

You know, I never really looked at IMVU before. I always thought it was a teen's and tween's place. Maybe it is worth a look, especially if the community has a say in the direction the community goes.

That was close. I thought he was going to mention the FIC.

I do not see much danger of that happening. Do you actually think there is a single working and efficient function anywhere in LL's code base?

Does there have to be for Dilbert's boss to think he has to have it?
- And has anyone ever met a corporate manager that was even half as smart as Dilbert's boss?

Pink? Who is Pink? Top 10%? Lost me here.

Pink Linden.. the one who is apparently managing XStreetSL or some part of it now.

Touche

I haven't sold through SLExchange for about a year and a half now. No reflection on them, it's just that the land biz kept me too busy to consider retexturing houses for $L 200 or whatever.

Maybe it's best I leave this alone, because if Pink is a Linden he can't post here without getting in trouble.

Which is one of the reasons Philip and M should be reading that article.

Pink was the one posting on Xstreet forums during the transitions and again on the floggs. As the drop dead date closed in for the migration, Pink stated that the Xstreet forums were not even used by any of the top ten Xstreet merchants by sales.

I seem to remember she said top ten, others remember it as top 10%. In either case the words were clear. You don't generate enough revenue so you don't matter. Cold, but then I do understand the 80|20 rule of thumb and in the end, this is a business for LL.

Shamelessly stolen from http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/cardinal-sin-of-community-management.html


This does sound familiar.

A few observations:

- amazing article; everyone should read it
- seems like it describes our experience with LL
- has two unexpected (at least for me) twists, directly related to our experience

but my main observation is this:

I can understand why LL would not listen to me. I mean, who am I? Six, Seven, Eight Okelli, what difference does it make?

But I can't understand why they won't listen to Des.

I presume, Desmond, that you feel they don't, or otherwise you wouldn't have posted this.

Edited to add: Desmond said it wasn't that at all (see below).

.

Yes, actually.

* It wouldn't work if that wasn't true.

* We've *seen* a lot of their code base, and it's better than most corporate code I've worked on.

PS: Desmond: that's a great article.

pst... it already has

Oh, no, this wasn't about 'me and Linden Research' at all.

In fact... to be honest, this article 'hit home' a bit, with regard to being a good estate manager. My kids are back in school now, which gives me a lot more SL time (because they have to do homework) but during summer, my online time can get kinda marginalised. Happens every year. Hard to be at the movies or in the surf, and online at the same time.

It was just a really, really good article overall, I thought. Not perfect but very worth reading.

I do have to say this about LL.. even though I hate just about all of the recent decisions coming down from the corporate overlords... They aren't catching us by surprise. I mean the thing in the article that struck me the most was the fact that the company was making changes and pointedly not talking about them. LL does talk.. and talk.. and talk.. they don't listen so good, but I mean, like the Zindra and no-fun-allow-on-the-OC thing.. This has been coming for so long it's kind of a non-event now that it's here (not detracting from those of you who had to pick up wholesale and move or just got dumped, just that we knew for months and months this going to happen).

Yeah, they need to work a bit on the back and forth part of the communications things, but they aren't surprising us with drastic changes like what seems to have happened with the other place. The last time I remember being totally WTF with LL was the Broadly Offensive fiasco, which fizzled out when they realized they had screwed up on a historic scale, in my opinion. Whereas the other company, the writer admits pretty much that it was a bad idea, but by golly they crammed it down everyone's throat without so much as a "say ahh" anyway. LL does tell us to say ahh.

SL has a horrific learning curve, pretty rough system requirements, does not hold your hand at all, just a whole lot of "man how can this succeed" technical issues, but still they are what everyone thinks about when you say "virtual world". The other place, when I hear it mentioned I think of "cartoon chat".. not "virtual world".

Sure bash SL for stupid ideas they roll out. I'm right there, I hate the Zindra thing, but we knew it was happening and why, and when and yadda yadda. If it had happened without warning, and without discussion, I would have been so gone. But I'm not, and a year from now when Zindra is the rockingest place online, maybe we will look back and say, "hey this worked out pretty good, the only juvenile delinquents in here are Elvis Presleys." hehehe.

Patasha

Oh sure. The open source code is rock solid.



OK, I am joking about the code. We have our up times and our down times but when you look at the what all SL really does I am amazed the world works at all. Pure and utter beginners writting scripts that will do just about anything and going in so many different places ... and yet the things still rez, morph, move and act as intended.