Web Directions

Fauxmunity

• In: Blog
• By:John
• October 14, 2008
• Leave a response

Those of us who’ve been round online a while will have seen at least one, and prob­a­bly sev­eral occa­sions where large organ­i­sa­tion starts blog/​forum/​online com­mu­nity, then pro­ceeds to try ham­fist­edly to con­trol the con­ver­sa­tion, whether by delet­ing adverse com­ments, stack­ing the com­mu­nity with “sock pup­pets” (com­mu­nity mem­bers who are employ­ees, or oth­er­wise asso­ci­ated with the entity run­ning the com­mu­nity) and so on.

Well, seems like folks won’t learn.

Cheryl Gledhill, from Moltn: (dis­clo­sure, good friend, and great sup­porter of Web Directions) recently posted on an episode at a new NAB web­site, myfu­ture­bank, which seems like a case study in how not to do online com­mu­nity building.

Noted social media and net­work guru (dis­clo­sure, friend, and long time speaker at Web Directions) has posted some detailed thoughts on the episode.

This is far from restricted to the online world. agents provo­ca­teur have been round as long as there have been mobs to incite, and in the activist world, there’s a term for grass roots com­mu­nity that is really a front for an indus­try group (incred­i­bly com­mon by the way) “astro­turf” communities.

Here’s my sug­ges­tion for a name for the phe­nom­e­non of fake com­mu­ni­ties online — faux­mu­ni­ties. I sus­pect they’ll be round for some time.

One response to “Fauxmunity”:

1. • By:Ubank slipup - zumio
   • October 21st, 2008

   […] on a recent slip up (putting it politely) by NAB’s Ubank — but Laurel and Stephen and John sum it up […]

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