Hi
BrightlyBob, glad to see you made it to this topic too!
I think BBob has touched brilliantly on the essence of why MRI had a certain success in keeping an active community: low moderation and very little interference from HQ, the community managers were able to make a difference in certain customer service issues where dealing with central CS or the property was leading to dead ends, community members were able to sort out questions stemming from promotions or changes in policies in a relatively efficient way, the way they allowed for members to run their individual travel-oriented blogs (or use them for reviewing properties, like I did), etc.
But I have to understand the other side of the coin: they had to run a small team of community managers (not sure if they also controlled other social media, such as FB groups/pages) and the Jive engine (mostly due to having to insert some forks to interact with data from the MARSHA database) was probably a headache to maintain for an IT department that is already scrambling to make their main platform run as smoothly as possible (promotion-registration issues and point-posting headaches, anyone?)
And while, for Marriott, this cut of resources might be logical in a time of cutting costs to survive, for the members this comes in a concentration of disappointing moves from HQ.
As for FT being intimidating from time to time: yesterday there was a member with some reviewer badges that very quickly pulled out the big snarky arsenal. Luckily moderation was pretty swift in pulling it (and my reply to him) down. It's good to see that there is a decent control on keeping a positive spirit here and an open spirit to exchange. And after all: it's impossible that it's worse than Facebook, which is a free unlimited buffet for trolls.