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Rob Curley of Lawrence, Kan., fame has given his detractors some fuel with an admission that he dropped the ball on the Washington Post’s hyperlocal online community experiment, LoudounExtra.com.
The Wall Street Journal’s Russell Adams writes about it on WSJ’s Web site today. The Post isn’t writing off the experiment yet, but Adams concludes:
“LoudounExtra.com remains little more than a skeleton of the site its architects pledged to build. One reason: the team of outsiders didn’t do enough to familiarize itself with Loudoun County or engage its 270,000 residents.”
Curley confesses that “I was the one who was supposed to know we should be talking to Rotary Club meetings every day. I dropped the ball.”
Curley also cites roadblocks put up by the Post, though, such as a lack of links from WashingtonPost.com to help drive traffic and the legal department squelching a plan to mine Loudoun-related content from other Web sites, like YouTube and Facebook.
Perhaps it’s too easy for those of us looking in from the outside to identify the problems: a team of outsiders who didn’t try hard enough to know and recruit the community; company silos getting in the way of content sharing; business processes getting in the way of progress; company brass bedazzled by a digital darling who, perhaps, wasn’t right for the job; a legacy company unwilling to bend/break the rules in the disruptive here and now.
But, damn, there are a lot of valuable lessons here for us as we build our own hyperlocal communities. No. 1 is know and be a part of your community.
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