Imag­ine the scene. You’re a woman who has heard great things about a new bou­tique tar­geted to women just like you. You steal away some time from work to go there. The minute you enter the bou­tique, you’re in heaven!

Image by Choconancy1 via Flickr

You hear kind & lov­ing voices on the bou­tique stereo speak­ers. Video from the CEO is play­ing telling you about the bou­tique, and all the won­der­ful things you’ll find there. You lis­ten, and you’re entranced.

The visu­als are heav­enly and sooth­ing, too…and just look! As you walk around, you see prod­ucts from other women you rec­og­nize, or would like to get to know bet­ter, at least.

You’re so engaged, so impelled by the mag­ni­tude and qual­ity of prod­ucts at this bou­tique, you feel com­pelled to give kudos to man­age­ment. So you search around a bit to find some­one who works at the boutique.

No one yet.

You search a bit more.

Maybe if you open this door…Nothing.

Then it hits you. You’re there all by your­self in this huge bou­tique! Why aren’t there any sales peo­ple here, you won­der? You’d like to buy some­thing here.

But wait! Did some­one call your name? Yes! But it sounds very dis­tant. You walk toward the sound and you find that it’s the owner. She’s call­ing to you from out­side the store. She wants to talk to you. You tell her you were just inside enjoy­ing the bou­tique, but she insists on talk­ing to you out­side of her lovely bou­tique. In fact, she prefers to talk to you from a competitor’s store!

Can you feel the frus­tra­tion of this poten­tial customer?

This may seem like the begin­ning to a short fic­tion story, but it’s a sce­nario I see car­ried out all to often with new social net­works and online com­mu­ni­ties. The com­mu­nity man­ager of a new or recently updated social net­work com­mu­nity often­times prefers to chat with com­mu­nity mem­bers out­side of the com­mu­nity entirely. Any con­tact with cus­tomers take place at other com­mu­ni­ties like Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn…all great net­works, but com­peti­tors for your customer’s time. If your com­mu­nity man­ager is spend­ing more time on these net­works than your own, then your com­mu­nity is suffering.

In a recent Online Com­mu­nity Cul­ture Sur­vey, one of the top 5 most influ­en­tial fac­tors listed in a community’s cul­ture was par­tic­i­pa­tion by the Host. And as women in social net­works, this study agrees whole­heart­edly with our view­points about the kind of net­works we feel con­nected to. Net­work execs that instruct their com­mu­nity man­agers to pump out edi­to­r­ial infor­ma­tion, then leave the brand com­mu­nity and con­vene else­where, yet expect com­mu­nity users to some­how feel con­nected with them have their heads buried in the sand.

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