Building Online Communities - Be Interested Before You Start
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008Categories: Online Communities
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The newest weekly series will talk about building online communities. There will be tips, tricks and procedures for building, developing, maintaining and monetizing your online community.
Building an online community is a lot like building a business (in real-life and virtually). You should be interested with the subject matter you’re dealing with and the audience you’re dealing with. If it’s an online game, I’d try to make sure that you actively play the game and you are actively involved with the community. If it’s about parrots, I’d imagine you should own a parent and are ready to converse with those that own a parrot.
Online communities, like blogs, will grow exponentially, if you don’t have the interest in having a long-term share in your new community, you should decide on a different idea or perhaps scrap the online community idea all together.
Relating to myself, I can write about the internet and web-related content until the cows come home, and you can be sure I’ll be sticking around. 
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February 6th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Yep. I’ve been tasked with building a community for a certain group of business professionals. I don’t know anything about this field, and I really don’t care. However, my company thinks this will be an excellent vehicle by which to advertise to this group.
I can’t think of a worse way or a worse reason to create a community.
February 6th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Hi Anonymous,
I think any intelligent user will be able see through the corporate facade and into the company’s intentions. Imagine trying to recruit even just 10 people to join such a community… oh my.
February 6th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
It gets better…
We have 186 “members” - people who were automatically added after we sponsored a golf tournament hole last summer. We posted videos, pics, etc., in their accounts and emailed out the links. People visited, saw their stuff and left in droves.
The company tried every hook it could find, nothing worked (gosh, I wonder why?), and now it’s in my (the web designer’s) lap. Fun? Wow.
February 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am
That sounds like a good idea for a discussion. I’ll keep that in mind for next week.