
ASOS Life, is the community for ASOS, an online fashion community. When they said they were launching such a thing, i was excited, i thought it would be a cool place to go to for fashion and pop culture, a real good community. It launched and i was disappointed. It was a letdown, and really poor. I stopped using it after a week or so.
Last month i tried to give it another go. I tried posting, and getting involved, and still i did not think it was very good. I decided to start a topic on their own forum telling them why it was bad, which got a good response from the people on the forums, not so much from the people at ASOS.
They seemed to try and gloss over any criticism, with ”we are always improving”, “we are still new” and so on…Basically a load of excuses which i dont think were very good.
Whats wrong with it
- Well if you are starting a community/forum then you should read this. The layout and the way there community works is wrong, and not a traditional style which people use. You do not go to a forum, post something and that is that. You create a post first, and then decide about the forum it should be in. This has a whole lot of problems, including duplicate content.
- The way the information is presented is horrible. It is so hard to read and understand by looking at it.
- You cant post in a forum! A fundamental thing about a forum is that you can post things, and you cant! What i mean is, they have filters set up so that if you type something “customer service related” then your post is held in a queue. WTF!?!?
- And on the customer service note: When you go to the community it is littered with topics about customer services…This is supposed to be a community!
The problem they have really is, they have no idea of what they are doing.
The community has a 9 – 5 corporate feel… Allthe little activity there is, is done in work time. This is because the community is not community driven, it is very corporate. It definitely does not have a community feel, which it is supposed to have. They dont seem to understand that an online community is 24/7, not 9-5. They may go home after work, but the community remains online, and people will want to chat and discuss things etc. It seems that the people who work on the forum only “work” on it, i.e. dont use it in their own time. It should be an extension of your life, if you are involved with something like that. You should be the kind of person who enjoys using online communities, and uses them in your own time, which clearly doesnt seem the case.
There is not enough posting, not enough topics, not enough people involved. This is because of a snowball effect. The community is bad, which means less people use it, which means less topics are created.
Whos Fault is it?
Well Ilana Fox was in charge of the community, and she launched ASOS Life. A year on, it is a miserable failure, and she has gone on to other things. She was in charge, so it is down to her. You could blame the developers of the terrible community, but at the end of the day she was in charge, claiming to ‘invent it’. She doesnt seem to have a clue about how a community actually works, and was obviously out of her depth. She worked at The Sun and The Daily Mail on online community projects, which isnt exactly hard considering the amount of visitors those site gets – They were already a home run.
However she couldnt get the 5 million visitors/month which ASOS supposedly gets involved with the community…If you seen the community you would never imagine those kind of figures are for the main site; If you cant make a community on the back of 5million visitors/month you should definitely think of a new career (which she seems to have done).
She since left, and i was going to apply for that job, because it would of been a good challenge and i could do great things…But after i posted a few things on their community, they dont seem to take their own community seriously, and focus more on Twitter and Facebook. Maybe they have just given up on it, like its users.
How to fix it
The whole community/platform is rubbish. They need to either completely rewrite it, or use a tried and tested community and develop that; They could modify Wordpress or VBulletin (or both) and make something groundbreaking and amazing; They wont, and it will stay the disappointing failure it has become. For some reason big companies would rather waste tens/hundreds of thousands of pounds on custom made things, when they could spend less and get so much more. They need to learn what a community is, what its for, and what it can potentially do, which is so much!
ASOS – Good @ Fashion, Good @ Customer Services, No clue @ Communities
