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Community Building other pages branding | advertising | personalizing this page theories | techniques | models | resources

theories

Community Building on the Internet is a combination of many things - it includes all of the items previously discussed: Branding and Partnering, Advertising and Promoting, Personalizing and Customizing, and includes one additional element - the building of confidence and trust.

Community Building is an attempt to:

keep existing "members"
attract new members
create strong member loyalty
create detailed and inexpensive marketing demographics on users preferences, buying habits, interests, which in turn allows

customization to match user demographics, which in turn allows

marketing and advertising to serve these demographics

Internet sales have to make the transition from trying to sell in the same manner as "brick and mortar" establishments to "capturing eyeballs". Users have to do their own market research and comparisons: consumers will return to those sites where they feel safe, secure, and where they feel their concerns are met, not only by the site sponsors, but also by the success of others using the site. Interactivity allows users to communicate - and word of mouth (or in this case Internet) is perhaps the most potent form of communication.

Amateurs Lead Web Community-Building
by Mo Krochmal
TechWeb New, May 13, 1999

Howard Rheingold, who pinpointed virtual communities long before they became a gold mine for Internet business, said the best communities are being built by amateurs -- not businesses. ...

There are three "Cs" for success in the Internet business -- content, commerce, and community, Rheingold said.

the companion web site for the book (as in ink squirted on dead trees)
Community-Building On The Web
by Amy Jo Kim

Naima - Amy Jo's company providing strategic design for web communities

First Monday articles

Imagined Electronic Community: Representations of Virtual Community in Contemporary Business Discourse
by Chris Werry
First Monday, September 1999

In contemporary business texts corporate sponsored online communities are described as central to the commercial development of the Internet. This paper presents a history of how online community has been represented in models of Internet commerce. It critically examines the arguments, narratives and rhetorical strategies drawn on within business texts to represent online community. The paper discusses why academics have an interest in involving themselves in helping organize alternative models of online community formation in the context of moves to corporatize and commodify higher education.

Education and Community: The Collective Wisdom of Teachers, Parents and Community Members
by Ted Nellen, February 1999

Schools that succeed all have a common thread: community involvement. Connecting all schools to their local communities in a viable way has been physically impossible. It is the contention of this paper that real connections between communities and schools can be made by the Internet. The Internet not only connects scholars in the schools to outside resources, but it also allows the community to observe the performance of its local scholars as telementors. Telementoring ultimately connects communities to their schools and creates more effective learning environments for all.

Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet
by Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben
First Monday, July 1998

The Virtual Agora: Online Ethical Dialogues and Professional Communities
by Alan Tidwell
First Monday, July 1999

The Greek agora, or market place, was where citizens met to discuss and debate topics of importance. The agora has been resurrected in electronic form, giving voice to many. Like the agora of old this largely unmediated forum provides important new avenues for debate. Examined here is the use of World Wide Web technology in fostering and sustaining ethical debates within and between professional communities.

techniques

e-mail (mailing list)

message boards

conferencing

text and voice chat

instant messaging

events calendar

member databases

file/photo uploads

group polls

privacy assurance

1-800

1-900

associated links

third-party services

URL Resources

iChat 
www.ichat.com 

Mirabilis ICQ 
www.icq.com 

Alexa 
www.alexa.com 

Quarterdeck Global Chat 
www.qdeck.com/qdeck/products/globalchat 

Computer Conferencing on the Web Site 
freenet.msp.mn.us/people/drwool/webconf.html 

PeopleLink 
www.peoplelink.com 

Activerse Ding! 
www.activerse.com 

TRUSTe Initiative www.etrust.com 

Excite PAL 
pal.excite.com 

Mail List Resources 

www.greatcircle.com/majordomo 
www.listserv.net 
www.qmail.org 
cs.utk.edu/pub/moore/bulk_mailer 
ftp.hpc.uh.edu/pub/tlb 
www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.html 
www.eit.com/software/hypermail

Here are three community sites I have looked at among many others :

Amateurs Lead Web Community-Building

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990513S0010

Web Site Design & Development
Some Things To Consider BEFORE You Build A Web Site

http://www.echost.com/html/body_consider.html

Story: What's Igniting Online Communities (And Why the Giants Are Spending So Much to Build Them)

http://205.181.113.18/anchordesk/story/story_2598.html

Online Communities and E-Commerce

Description:

Online communities can increase consistent web site visitation but careful
planning is required to see increases in consumer sales from your web site.

Summary:

Online communities typically start with an existing community extended to the web.
Leveraging existing communities, or creating new communities requires that you focus on inventing and catalyzing community benefits that create lasting bonds.

http://www.webcentricman.com/html/i_tip_ec_community_1297.html

Web tools to build Customer Relationships

http://www.webcentricman.com/html/t_tip_intimacy_tool_100197.html

The Customer Intimacy Business Case

http://www.webcentricman.com/html/opport_intimacy_100197.html

models

Good community sites:

1. www.iwon.com

2. www.wrenchhead.com

3. www.saturn.com

4. www.yahoo.com

5. www.ebay.com

Bad community sites:

1. www.porschenet.com

2. www.iwillfollow.com

3. www.handilinks.com

4. www.book-club.net

This site Joe Waz found, I think it has a lot of good information for community building.

www.saturncars.com/

Visit this link with saturn, they go pretty in depth for convincing you that
they're involved in the off-line community. Good techniques for using the
internet to become user friendly within potential customers.

www.saturncars.com/company/community/index.html

I am going to use framing to put concert info into my site. I like this one: POLLSTAR - The Concert Hotwire and this one: Musi-Cal... Concert Schedules: Folk Music, Country Music, Rock Music & more! This will give users the chance to see what music is in their area or look at their favorate bands concert dates. I am going to frame this music trivia for people to play as well unless I find something better. Trivia games, fun for everyone. Challenge your trivial knowledge by taking a quick quiz I think it would be cool for people to test music knowledge. Then I am going to set up some vidio type games for users to play at our site. I am not sure what I am going to use yet. I will keep looking. Last I am going to make a list of links for users to store music files and create their own links to our site from MP3 homepages that we will encourage they make.

resources

Crossing the Communicasm

by Stacy Lawrence

We've always had our qualms about community sites. Back in 1997, the hype generated by GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod and the like was deafening. Recently, Forrester Research shed some light on why that noise has suddenly died down.

According to this research, communities are good for one thing only, and that's driving repeat traffic. Nineteen out of 20 content sites surveyed listed return visitors as their goal, making it by far the top reason to have a community. Online marketers are hesitant to court communities. Among 30 marketers that target communities, only 11% of their online ad budget went to communities. Portals and vertical sites represented much larger pieces of the spending pie:

Online budget allocation among community marketers

Source: Sept. 1999 Forrester Research Inc.

For marketers that do go after communities online, Forrester has some common-sense advice. Targeting your audience is essential, which means no banners for financial planning interspersed with chat on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And go for the soft sell by ditching banners and using sponsorships instead.

Marketing popular and fun products in a community space is always a safe bet. These users love tech toys such as Palm Pilots and entertaining items such as videos and CDs.

To improve user-generated content, Lycos' Tripod recently introduced an innovative affiliate program that pays site builders that generate more than 1,000 pageviews per day $1 per thousand ad impressions. This means that someone who generates about 5,000 impressions daily can stand to make about $1,800 per year. While that's a small return, Tripod's intent is clear.

General Manager Don Zereski tells ICONOCAST that Tripod is much like a music label in that, "an inordinate amount of our business is driven by stars." So, Tripod hopes that this move will help cultivate some aspiring starlets that will justify lavish advertiser and sponsor spending.

panel members: Steve, John, Dave, Pete