Value Added Networking = Community

Chris Brogan had a great post on his blog over the week-end that stirred a lot of good debate in the comments.

The key paragraph for me was this:

We don’t just join communities because we like a product or service or thing. We gather around people who feel what we feel, and we share passion for things that bring us some sense of pleasure or joy, or even healing.

This seems to me to encapsulate the very essence of why businesses must embrace the web. It’s no longer good enough to stick up a web site and think you’ve done the ‘web thing’. Using the web is often as much about changing the way you think about your customers as it is about the technology. It’s about listening, responding, and – you may not like to hear this – forming a community.

Let’s try to get over all the touchy-feely connotations of ‘community’ and think of it from a purely business sense. Surrounding your business with a community gives you an immediate advantage over your competitors (assuming your competitors are still among the “we’ve tried the web and it didn’t work” crowd).

How so? Look at what a community offers you:

• Continual feedback
• Market research on tap
• Product and service suggestions
• People talking about your products and services
• People linking to your web site and product pages
• Recommendations and testimonials – without needing to ask

You can probably think of some more examples yourself. (Add them in the comments, if you do. I’m sure I’ve missed some obvious ones!)

But building a community is not something that can be done artificially. That’s like planting a football team in a new location and expecting a loyal following to turn up at the first home game and begin supporting the team with passion and fervour. Can’t be done. (Anyone remember Wimbledon F.C. sand their proposal to shift to Dublin before ending up in Milton Keynes?) That means that a community rarely develops where a company might want it to – on part of the web site set aside for ‘customers’, say.

Chances are, there is a small community of people already sharing opinions and tips about some of your products. The first thing you need to do is find them, listen to them, and work out how best to engage with them. That’s not a job that can be hurried. There are no short cuts. This is one of the key elements of a business web strategy.

Imagine that: using the web to improve your business and your web site plays little or no part in the process.

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Tagged as: chris brogan, community, networking, small business