Unlike that famous scene in Field of Dreams where Ray Kinsella hears an ominous voice whisper “if you build it they will come,” the same is far from true for corporate / branded online communities. Case in point: the Chapters-Indigo online book community.

At the time of its release, the company noted that the move was a “respectful nod to user-generated content and bold encouragement for peer-to-peer recommendation of books, music and movies.” Fair enough. I liked the strategy – of all things, books /reading, seemed the optimal place for peering and sharing (e.g. the book club) – and it seemed to be the logical progression from user-recommendations and “like” purchases.

But then I joined the Chapters community and experienced first hand why it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel, and why if you choose to do so, that new wheel of yours better fit my other bicycles.

I spent quite a bit of time playing around with it when I first joined. I added fifty or so books, read some reviews, and then I stopped using it. Why? Scale and relationships.

First off, scale – building a network such as this from scratch means you’ll inevitably go through a period with low user numbers. For example, my “community” amounts to me, myself and I. I suppose I could add some “friends,” perhaps even some who share the same interests as me, but with a few social networks on the go, do I really want to add another more? In theory, the value captured by users in a new network will increase exponentially as the community grows – but – this assumes a non-competitive community marketplace.

(note: I wasn’t able to sort out how many people have signed up to the Chapters Online Community. They’re running a content based on the “100,000th” member but I have a suspicion based on the number of reviews and members who appear in searches that the actual number of users is far, far less.”

And herein lies the link to relationships. For comparative purposes I added the Facebook Books iLike application and immediately learnt that a dozen of my friends were using the application, as well as over 23,000 daily users who have so far reviewed over 20 million books.

Given my choices, it’s not really a fair fight for Chapters.

But that doesn’t mean their initial idea wasn’t on target. The community itself is both logical and strategically correct, i.e. the lesson here isn’t “don’t build the ballpark.” Rather it comes down to data portability. Confined to a walled corporate garden I’m far less likely to contribute my time and data to build something that I can build on an existing foundation elsewhere. Allow me to bring my data from your walled garden to my other networking sites, however, and you’ve a much better change of keeping my attention.