Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Another book I read over the festive period was “The Perfect Store - Inside eBay“. I think there’s a lot to be learned from successful web organisations, none more so than eBay. A lot of Internet companies in recent years can put most of their success down to developing communities. By developing close bonds with their users, eBay was able to go from strength-to-strength like many of its peers.

What I really enjoyed about the book though was the fact that it really highlighted occasions why eBay got it wrong. They suffered negative feedback after introducing a number of features over the past couple of years. Instead of ramming their changes down users’ throats, they engaged with the disaffected community and refined the features.

As stated in the book, the reason why developing communities is so important for web services is because of Metcalfe’s Law. Here’s a snippet from the Wikipedia explanation:

The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: A single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.

I think we’re reaching the stage where Metcalfe’s law can be observed beyond the web and fax machines. The reason for this is largely down to the Internet. Due to social networking in various guises (be it on blogs, Internet forums, etc), users of a variety of goods and services are being brought together, allowing a consensus to be formed about goods, services and organisations.

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