A great (bad) example of this is Sprint’s Buzz online community. I know a guy (through Twitter) who is one of gen-y types I’m talking about–evangelizing social media to anyone who will listen at Sprint. He frequently reports his efforts to get them to buy in and start doing something, and recently excitedly announced that the CEO was starting a blog where people could post questions and he’d answer them. I don’t think I can imagine a business model more destined for failure–take a company with plenty of angry customers and tell them they’re now going to be able to receive personalized attention from the CEO. As if the guy is going to be able to keep that promise–it would take more hours than there are in a day, every single day, for the guy to keep up. The result? People will now have something new to complain about–Sprint dropping the ball on yet another thing.

To me, branded online communities don’t work because they’re all isolated and require individual attention in order to keep up. I am a member of several and have basically abandoned them–it’s too hard to remember to check them all or even keep up with the digests. Again, there are only so many hours in a day. To me, a company’s best bet is to integrate their social media efforts into existing applications–e.g. Twitter. Like the ComcastCares thing on Twitter–it’s gotten them a lot of good press and gone a long way towards turning their reputation for bad customer service around. I am not a Comcast customer, but I see people tweeting about it and my opinion of Comcast has changed as a result. Never would have happened if ComcastCares was an isolated online community that I would never have joined.