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Building Online Communities
By Drew Meyers | October 26, 2006
Being interested in social networking, this topic immediately caught my attenton. Here’s some notes-
Tara Hunt talked about Commodity vs Community. Don’t be a commodity.
Community:
- Takes time and patience
- requires introspection, commitment and honesty
- Need to stop outgoing messages & start listening to incoming messages (make yourself available)
- Be open more than you are comfortable
- Put community first- before profits
- There will be chaos
- It’ll be rewarding
Tips to Success:
- Increase the “win” for your customers
- Create open communication between customers
- Be real (I can’t stress this enough)
- Get a personality
- Reward your customers
- Be extraordinary
Betsy Aoki talked a little bit about the QnA community she is building. Let the community speak for itself- take the high road.
Elisa from BlogHer mentioned the following points that I found interesting-
- building community is circular
- It’s not enough to just ask the community what they want
- Make sure to realize that not everyone will love your community- transparency is key (this topic keeps coming up)
- Set the right expectations (super critical) from the outset
- Community will tell you where to go- and go with you
- Strong communities will self-police- take advantage of it (and benefit from the power of the community responding on your behalf)
- Know your audience
- Debate is good (as long as it doesn’t get into personal attacks)- people are engaged and interested. Have guidelines that promotes civil debates.
Once I have time to actually add my own thoughts on the subjects covered at the Blog Business Summit and spend some time putting them into words, I’ll post a summary- maybe not until this weekend though.
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