What are the most common reasons?
It's say the most common reason is that they didn't start with building relationships. People try to shortcut it and just build a community by mass importing large groups of people into a conversation platform and expect the relationships to just happen.
People only participate in communities where they feel like by becoming a trusted member of that group, they increase their own value in some way. That only happens if they care about the community. They're only going to care about the community if they feel like they're a part of something, and have built relationships there.
Particularly w/i the tech community, some people have a "build it and they will come" mentality. I do agree that one of the best ways to acquire users quickly is to do really amazing things that people talk about + are press worthy - but that's not necessarily community. That being said, having a product that people don't particularly care for or that does not have the community "built in" to the product usually leads to community fails.
Also, having less than pure community intentions (like "success" or profit, etc) can def contribute. Like David says above, community is all about relationships. If you don't care to actually build the relationships, and just want the value of the community, it's just not going to work. Ppl smell that.
There's the one easy one: starting a community for the wrong reasons. I think we've all seen it and know what it looks like.
I think the other big one is making it sticky, which is a broad topic. When you first join a community, unless it's something insanely exciting, you're not going to remember to visit it regularly. Creating this stickiness through activity, RELEVANT activity, frequent reminders, etc...that's the hard work of getting a community to really succeed.
...which is basically what you guys said. :)
Building or maintaining? Sometimes communities shift, and/or are multifaceted, and the company may not notice it. Companies tend to assume that their community is "just like them," and they fail to recognize who their actual community is (not just a sliver of it). An example of how I handle it - I tweet something that's supposed to give the gist of a developer feature, without seeming too intimidating for the non-dev. Purpose? I'd like them to see that we're doing cool stuff. One of our own developer employees complains that a tweet was off the mark, or they wouldn't have described it that way. My response: it wasn't meant for you (meaning: it was meant for another facet of our community). Anyone noticed similar things in this vein?
