Greenopolis – Drupal vs. Business Model

It’s very easy to lose track of your goals if your business plan isn’t as strong as your solution.

Take Greenopolis.com for example.  Conceived by Waste Management, this social networking platform has just been abandoned for a less risky social media website.  To me this is a prime example of what happens when an engineering group takes control over what should be a marketing effort.

Originally, Greenopolis.com was conceived as a social networking site that would be built using a Drupal platform.   It’s flexibility would allow for partners to not only be sponsors, but more importantly, they could be interactive within the website.  Partners would be able to build modules that could plug into the existing site, thereby building a collaborative social network that wasn’t soley based on a single provider.  But without a clear business model, Drupal’s flexibility turned Greenopolis into a single source application instead of a collaborative effort between different technologies.

My observation, as creative director at the web development company in charge of the project at the time, is that the issue started when the engineering team began to truly understand what Drupal was capable of.  They inadvertenly started to turn the site away from a partnership to a single provider site.  In other words, by focusing so much on Drupal and it’s capabilities to “be anything,” the engineers slowly started to build Greenopolis out of it’s business model.  The focus became what Drupal could do and engineering functionality, not what the partners and their applications would bring to the site.

Because the client didn’t have a clear vision of how the site would actually work in the “real world,” when they took the project over in-house, they began to realize that the development firm hadn’t been the problem, it was their lack of clear goals for the site.  So when they couldn’t get the membership and traffic to the website that they had counted on, they simply turned it into a generic social media application doing exactly what they didn’t want to in the first place.  They are now just another green social media site in the pack.

Many of the “higher ups” on both sides, blamed the failure of the site on Drupal, but what it really came down to was the lack of a clear business plan.  What the important lesson here is that if you don’t have a clear vision and plan, then it doesn’t matter what tool you use.   Knowing what the goals of your site are is more important than knowing what solution you are going to use to create it.

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• September 27, 2009 by Diallo Hudgins