One interesting thing I heard at the MLK event in Memphis in 1998 was an expert comment that community doesn’t exist anymore in the way it meant in the 1960s. That’s because we all talk about community without ever questioning if in real world terms it actually exists. So here’s to online communities helping to bring the community ideal back to life!
Nice example of the power of recommendation to build a community from Matt Rhodes’ FreshNetworks Blog:
The growth came from the constant and ongoing growth work that the community management team have been doing. But the final push came when another community member picked up on some of this activity and started to talk about our community on another site. We didn’t ask them to do this, they just thought we were offering something of interest to members of a very well read forum in the UK.
The result was immediate and notable. Overnight, our membership base increased five-fold and by the weekend we had a much larger number of members than we might have expected by the end of a full year of the community. And what was perhaps more important is that these new members joined the conversations and discussions on the site. Increasing number of members is fine, but what we really want to do is to increase the value of the community to all members. And this only really happens when people take part.