I rarely disagree with Rich Millington. He isn’t afraid of saying no when others are busy trying to find ways to say yes so that they get paid. Rich is one of the few people out there pushing real online community management. Your Facebook fans, your Twitter followers, your Pinterest pinners… these aren’t communities and, like me, Rich isn’t afraid to say so.

This recent post of his categorises many of his better blog posts and is nothing short of comprehensive. Make sure you bookmark it and make time to read the articles relevant to you.

Unfortunately, the result is usually that it doesn’t happen. Not because there’s anything wrong with the community idea but because it’s not fast enough, too big, too small, too expensive or too “out there”.

I hate to see some of these ideas go to waste, but I can’t make them happen on my own. So, what are my options?

• Could I seek out others with complementary skill sets and, together, we can build it in our spare time?
• Could I spend a lot of time putting together a proposal and then seeking an investor so I could hire people to build it?
• Could I try to build it myself in my spare time? (Ha! I was barely able to put this blog theme together on my own!)

…or is there another option? Share it with me in the comments!

Have you had a great community idea but wondered how to make it happen? What did you do?

So, I’ve reviewed it all, made some edits and wrapped it up into a single eBook: Defining Community.

To find out more, visit my eBook page. It’s available to download as a PDF or EPUB (compatible with iBooks for iPhone/iPad).

Community managers pre-date your grandfather.

It’s just that community managers haven’t always been called community managers. Depending on what they do, in the offline world they have other titles. Here are a few:

• Host
• Administrator
• Group counsellor
• Coordinator
• Ringleader
• Teacher
• Moderator
• Guide
• Pastor / Father / Minister / Padre

You see, what online community managers do has very little to do with the fact that what we do is online but it’s the online part that makes us unique. Otherwise, it’s essentially the same. This is also why it’s easiest to define community by looking back to a time that pre-dates the Internet.

Can you think of other examples of “offline” community managers? Share them in the comments!

(Oh, also, I tried to think of some pre-Internet titles for social media managers. All I could come up with was ‘gossip’… ;)

Where would we be without all these great community building tools that have sprung up in the past five years?

My answer: We’d probably have more interesting and genuine online communities.

Before I continue, this post is inspired in part by Patrick O’Keefe’s first post of the year: There is Not Enough Time in the Day for Me to Tell You That Forums Are Not Dead. As Patrick says, everyone keeps declaring that forums are dead but the reality is that they’re not.

If I was asked to build a community but I could only use one tool (or platform or whatever you want to call it), my answer would be a forum (also known as a message board or discussion board – all the same thing).

Here are the reasons why I would choose a forum:

1. They’re easy to understand
   Potential new community members can get an idea of what’s going on very quickly. Everything is organised hierarchically and it’s easy to drill down into threads. Here’s a fun test: ask your mum (the perennial computer novice) to make a post on Facebook and on a forum. From my own personal experience with my mum, she was posting to forums of her own accord without me ever showing her how; she still doesn’t “get” Facebook.
2. Low barrier to participation
   Other tools want you to add a profile picture, find your friends and, once all that’s out of the way, you still have to find the community you wanted to be a part of and like, follow or join it. Joining a forum is very easy (which is why so many were plagued with spambots for so long). At the very least you pick a username, prove you’re human (spam countermeasures), verify yourself with an email address, and you can start posting.
3. Highly transparent and easy to find
   It’s public, it shows up on Google and it’s easy to search. All the participation and interaction happens out in the open (private messaging still exists in case you need some privacy). I cannot count the number of times I’ve searched for an answer to a specific problem and found the answer in a forum via a Google search.
4. Easy to participate, easy to lurk, easy to avoid
   Forums are independent. They’re not (usually) a sub-feature of some larger network. If you want to participate, you go to the forum. If you want to look but not participate, you go to the forum. If you don’t want to see anything about the forum, you don’t go to the forum. Facebook and Twitter are set up so that, even if you stop following, you’ll still see others sharing or retweeting it after you’ve “left”.
5. Potential for unlimited interaction
   What’s great about the “pure” aspect of forums is that there’s nothing stopping you from using a thread for whatever you want. Want to run a Q&A? Start a thread with a question. Want to add a knowledge base, start a thread with “How to…”. If these are more important parts of your online presence, you might want to use dedicated tools for those purposes instead, but if you just need something ad hoc for now, your forum can do it.
   Plus, if your members want to express themselves further, they can. Signatures, avatars, post ratings, “gamification”: these have all been present in forums for years.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for other tools; they’re all part of the rich ecosystem we call the Internet. They all have their uses and those uses are often very useful.

If you’re starting a community, start with the basics — a space for people to talk — then you can layer in more complex features as you need them.

More and more of us are making purchasing decisions in which we value the opinions of others above all other information sources. Although an advertisement on the TV or in a magazine might raise our awareness of a product, we aren’t likely to make a purchasing decision until we’ve experienced some social engagement about it.

For example, I was looking for a solution to easily play digital videos through a TV. I had used a PS3 to do this in the past but now I sought an alternative. Being a long-time Mac user, I was aware of the Apple TV, however, I wasn’t willing to purchase one without asking others about it.

Thinking of buying an AppleTV tomorrow. Any advice?

— Greg Lexiphanic (@lexiphanic) December 29, 2011

I tweeted about it and received a lot of replies with recommendations and advice.  The replies I received helped me to make that purchase. I’m glad I did; I already love the damned thing.

Marketers have always been aware of how important “word of mouth” can be but it’s only with social media and social commerce that the influence of others can be delivered to any location at the speed of light and in perpetuity.

With these shifts in buyer behaviour, new ways of building businesses have developed. Businesses built around community are seeing long-term success. Kickstarter has demonstrated that some of the most fascinating product innovations of today were brought about through the investment of a community of people who shared a common interest in seeing that product succeed. Amazon was one of the first to use social commerce to help people make buying decisions — that’s what all the ratings, reviews, recommendations and ‘other people also bought’ information is all about.

The future of business has social commerce and community at its core.

Now it’s your turn. Do you agree? Is community the future of business? How can your business place community at its core?

Since we’re now officially in 2012, I thought I might drop some quick prediction bombs for the year. They’re not based on science but they are based on my observations of how things have been developing over the past year. So, let’s begin…

1. We’re going to see some very complicated but useless new online community tools
   They’ll exist to help you build a community but, frankly, they won’t be very good. They won’t be very good because, like most new community tools, they focus too much on the individual and not enough on the community.
2. Social commerce will be all the buzz in 2012
   People help other people buy things. Expect a lot more focus on this in 2012. Amazon’s been doing it for years and Facebook will make an impact on it this year.
3. 2012 will be the Year of the Online Community Manager
   Unfortunately, that also means it will be the year where every social media guru changes their title without changing their tune. That aside, expect to hear a lot of stories about new community sites that succeed because they listened to their online community manager instead of their marketing or IT managers.
4. We’ll understand what community is a bit better
   Right now, people use the word ‘community’ to refer to Facebook users, Twitter users, the recipients of broadcast-only email marketing and just about anything else. By the end of 2012, I think we’ll start to better understand that your Facebook fans, your Twitter followers and your eDM recipients aren’t communities at all.
5. More attention for niche communities
   Small, highly-specific communities are often the most successful ones. This has been the case for years but they’ve not received much attention. If you have a very specific interest, there’s a chance an online place exists for it. Expect to see more businesses attempt to create these in 2012 with varying degrees of success.
6. CCO: Chief Community Officer
   I’d like to think this will become a new executive position but it’s probably more of a 2015 thing. ;)

What do you think? Am I completely wrong? Did I miss anything? Share your thoughts in the comments.

While we’re talking definitions, let’s talk about “social media”.

Social media. What is it?

The common answer is “all that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube” stuff. And that’s what most people mean when they use that phrase. They’re referring to online social networks and media sharing tools.

The reality, however, is slightly different. The reality is that social media is bigger than that. Social media is the whole Internet. And much more.

“You’re crazy, Greg!” I hear you say… but before you close this browsing tab, hear me out.

You see, a lot of people look at the Internet like a library: lots of collections of pages. Pages which can be edited in a great variety of ways. This page editing is used to engage with each other socially.

A page is a medium. Offline, they are newspapers, television, radio and magazines. These are things which can be controlled, programmed, altered. They are controlled by a few to communicate to many.

What about a conversation, though? Is a conversation a medium? It can’t be controlled, programmed or altered. It’s something that occurs naturally, spontaneously. It is the meaningful social engagement between at least two people; an engagement which operates in both directions — not just one.

The Internet isn’t a library; the Internet is a conversation. It’s a massive spontaneous multi-stranded cross-referenced conversation.

That conversation isn’t limited to just the Internet. It extends beyond that and into our “offline” spaces. It’s not just the Web but also our text messages, our heart-to-hearts, and, really, any poly-directional interaction we engage in with anyone else.

Everything on the Internet is a conversational statement being made and, with the power of hyperlinking, everything else can be a reply.

So, what is social media? The Internet is a medium; it is one of many media that make up social media. It’s what we’re doing right now; it’s what you spend most of your time doing online.

When you look at the Internet that way, doesn’t your approach change?

What will you be doing in 2012?

Will you still be working in “social media” or will you be working in online communications or online communities?

Will you be putting together some web pages or will you be starting a conversation (and replying to many more)?

See you in the new year… and don’t forget to subscribe!

Dust is still settling a bit around here as Christmas approaches but I thought I should at least say hello.

Why not subscribe in your favourite news reader?

More soon. :)

Over the past several weeks I’ve talked about redefining the word community but what I’m really doing is returning community to its truest form.

Community is difficult to define because it’s something that’s hard for objective observers to see even though community members can feel it. Many have tried to go about it, specifying objective indicators such as the tools that group members use, the types of interactions they have with one another and even diminishing the relevance of how much time is spent together by a group’s members. Many of them sound right but just don’t feel right because they’re missing the truth of it all: community is something you feel.

A community is a group of people who feel a “sense of community”.

Thankfully, a “sense of community” is relatively well defined, thanks to the work of many community psychology scholars, in particular McMillan and Chavis. Their 1986 paper, Sense of community: a theory and definition, tells us everything we need to know about how to identify when someone is experiencing a sense of community. If enough members of a group are feeling a sense of community, it is reasonable to suggest that their group is therefore itself a community.

So, let’s go back over how a sense of community is defined. For the purposes of clarity and to save you some time, I’ll do this in point-form. If you want to learn more, follow the link to the relevant article.

A sense of community has the following four key elements:

Membership

• A demonstrable boundary between those who are members and those who are not (us vs them)
• The boundary can be:
• geographical
• access-oriented, only those who have access to something are part of it
• a label, requiring a tag, badge or title
• a rite-of-passage, requiring the completion of a task
• a shared system of symbols such as uniforms, handshakes, subcultural dialects, or private memes
• a combination of all of the above
• Members use the boundary to identify one another
• Members use the boundary to identify new members

Influence

• The ability for a member to influence the rest of the community
• The ability for the community to influence each of its members
• The ability for the community to influence external parties
• Can also be looked at as “trust”, as in “we share things with one another” not “we listened to our customers!”

Fulfilment

• The need that instigated joining the community must be satisfied, or is replaced with a new need that must be satisfied
• Giving to the community will result in fulfilment of needs
• Communities have an economy of social trade, often fuelled by mutual reinforcement of one another and of the community
• Going above and beyond in supporting the community will not only fulfil a member’s own needs but also further those of the community; the rewards range from a stronger community to all sorts of other unexpected benefits

Connection

• A shared emotional connection is possibly the most important element for true community
• Frequent high-quality interaction will result in stronger bonds between members
• Communities that have a purpose and shared tasks will develop greater group cohesion
• Members sharing a major community event will be more strongly connected to one another
• Can develop into a spiritual bond, like Aussie “mateship”

You’ll notice these four elements have a lot of potential for interrelation and overlap. That interconnectedness of the elements is important — to truly exist a sense of community requires all four elements.

At the end of my post on Connection I cobbled together a final definition of community. It was:

“Community is a group of people who, together, share the feeling they belong to something, can influence and be influenced by one another, and can have their needs fulfilled by fulfilling the needs of the group.”

The truth is I knew the process would end with that result. If it were that easy, community would have been more clearly defined long ago.

The innovation I’m introducing here isn’t an innovation at all. It’s just a long forgotten technique for looking at community: observing it from the inside instead of the outside.

A community is a group of people who experience a sense of community.

If you’re building a community, you should focus on helping your members find that sense of community. The rest will follow on its own.

If you loved this series, be sure to subscribe in your favourite RSS reader, as I’ll soon be making available a free e-book including all of this re-defining info. You can subscribe here.