The headline in the New York Times on Urban Baby’s site redo says “Don’t mess with mom’s chat”. It seems that most of the changes they made left the hardcore devotees furious so they organized a boycott of the site (seems the boycott was not wildly successful). The main complaint and mistake seems to be that the changes appear to have been done with no input from the audience.

Question: What review was done? With whom? How? On the Urban Baby site it says that they posted messages “on the site front door and in newsletters”. Just goes to show how many of the devoted read these. So if a tree falls in the woods… will anyone hear it? In a community environment, not only do they hear it, they find a way to broadcast it - especially if they were not a part of the process.

Not only did the changes bifurcate the chat forum, it made it harder for community members to post. According to the article, many are no longer posting because they feel they’ve been asked to “start talking” as opposed to the usual post or comment at will. From a social media standpoint, create a playing field in partnership with your audience, but please know enough to join their conversation. According to the NY Times, the community felt that the site was made to feel very iVillage like - and they say that that there is no greater insult for urbanbaby.com cognoscenti.

So here we have a company that is in the process of selling to CBS and they are making changes to a community site without consulting the core audience. And the changes made are in sync with the company’s ideas and not in sync with the audiences’ culture or community home online. Urban Baby seeded a possible site disaster as people commenting and posting dropped dramatically and traffic may well come down precipitously. The defining quote at the end of the NY Times article was: “Even the “I hate my mother-in-law posts” are not getting a response”.

It appears from the site that urbanbaby.com is trying to respond to the feedback. Either way, for a company that has built a huge community, this seems like a very basic mistake.