Spark Interactive

I can not believe that NBC with a once in a lifetime opportunity to postion themselves as leader in online media failed so miserably with the olympics live broadcasts. 

My email to their marketing department resulted in a mostly canned reply.... "You can get a guest pass for 4 hours"  But in fact the guest pass still requires you to have some relationship with a cable provider. 

I pointed out that they had obviously done no market research and did not care about massive potential recurring revenue. Below are the bullet points that show that who ever is running the show at NBC online is so far out of touch with online viewers today that he does not belong anywhere near that position. How many Millions or maybe Billions of dollars were thrown away for this mess. 

You know, one of the best measurements of success for an online community is the level of complaints coming in. 

No seriously, if you have people complaining that something is not working of that they want to see something different or that you just have it wrong, then you know you have a good audience for what ever your market is.  This means these people have passion for your niche. They care about the topic and care enough about the community to want to see it improve. If no one is complaining, then no one cares.  Don't take these complaints as a negative in any way. It's free market research and it will also tell you what’s working and what it not. Embrace the level of response and even more importantly embrace the people who are complaining. They will be your champions and thought leaders. 

Having run online communities for over 10 years, I've experienced a LOT of complaints, comments, suggestions and yes surprisingly enough, kudos along the way to know what indicates that you have arrived at that critical mass.  A good rule of thumb is for every one person who takes the time to complain about something, there are probably 50 more who experienced the same issue but either don't care enough or are not vocal enough to let you, and the rest of the community, know about it. I've taken my most vocal participants and knighted them, so to speak. You make them your group moderators, writers, bloggers or advocates and give them a title within the community. One of them will eventually rise to the level of Tribe Leader and take over running the community for you.