Here are some ways to make a community fail:
- Manipulation — for example, creating false member accounts, and injecting disguised advertising.
- Lack of transparency, not communicating honestly with your members.
- Unnecessary censorship, cutting off criticism of your company.
- Talking at members instead of with them.
- Lack of community management, not helping members with their problems or maintaining order on the website.
- Activities that need an instruction manual, or which are slow in showing results. If you ask members to upload photos, and the process is that they send. their photos to a staff member, who publishes them a week later, members are going to lose interest. Internet users expect instant gratification.
- Activities designed based on what the company wants, or what the company thinks the members want, but not what the members really want.
- A slow-loading website or constant technical problems. Users will get frustrated and leave.
- A website with no visible activity and content that never changes.
