Web Business 50 winner REI.com doesn’t see any correlation between its sales performance and the threaded bulletin boards on its site. The message boards are "not hurting anything, not helping anything," says Joan Broughton, vice president of online and direct sales for Kent, Wash.-based REI. "If I had to put more money into it, I wouldn’t," she says bluntly. "But I don’t have to."

Companies that have had little tangible business success with their online communities generally rushed to put them on their sites without evaluating whether they were really appropriate for their company, establishing a business goal or objective for them, or realizing that it actually takes effort to get visitors to participate.

Some companies, however, did community right and reaped the rewards, such as:

• Insight into customers’ preferences, habits and attitudes
• Ideas for new products and services
• Increased customer loyalty
• Fewer calls to service departments
• Increased sales

Eight Million Ways to Get Involved: OReilly.com

The technology books that Sebastopol, Calif.-based O’Reilly & Associates publish (the ones with the cute animal drawings on their covers) are geared toward a very specific group?software developers. So it would make sense for O’Reilly to have some sort of community forum on its 8 million-page site. Or would it?

"There are already great forums existing on the Web for developers?Usenet News, for example," says Allen Noren, director of Web services. "It’s not worth our effort to try to replicate those." So instead of supporting a chat room or a bulletin board, O’Reilly takes a different approach to building a community on its site: It takes on political issues.

For example, about two years ago, Tim O’Reilly, founder of the company, spoke out against the lawsuit Amazon.com filed against Barnesandnoble.com for using a feature similar to Amazon.com’s patented one-click ordering tool. O’Reilly didn’t think it was fair for Amazon.com to patent open-source tools that it acquired only because those tools were freely available in the first place.

On Feb. 28, 2000, he posted an open letter to Amazon.com on OReilly.com. At the end of the letter, O’Reilly invited site visitors who opposed the patenting of software applications to type their name onto a petition. O’Reilly says the petition accumulated 10,000 signatures in 60 hours and persuaded Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to rethink his company’s strategy. And although that admission didn’t stop Amazon.com from pursuing its suit (which was decided in its favor), according to O’Reilly, Amazon.com ceased trying to patent other applications and business processes.