There’s been a lot of talk lately on the value of social networking tools, sites, blogs, blah, blah, blah… and it starts me wondering, “How do you build community?” Seriously. So, the social scientist in me takes over and I begin to digg into this deli.icio.us question and see what the rest of the oncomm has to say about it. I’m sure if the information is out there, by now I must have reddit.

This concept of building community sounds great, especially to marketing types who see this as a way to generate traffic “for free” but kind of breaks down when it comes to actually starting to build. Lets consider for a moment the reasons why we might “build community” purely for marketing reasons and then we’ll dive into perhaps the factors that actually drive community which might give us some insight into how community actually gets built.

• TRAFFIC-> Interesting content means interested visitors, right?
• KNOWLEDGE -> Sharing or obtaining. If you write it, they will come.

Now, let’s think about what these factors mean to community.

First, we should probably establish the difference between traffic and community. Amazon.com gets a ton of traffic and plenty of comments and feedback on products. Does it have “community” or “web2.0″ features? Is it a “social networking” site? Hardly. It’s pretty clear that traffic isn’t community. Next let’s consider knowledge sharing and community. For this let me use the example of, well… how about Micro$oft. Like many other software vendors, the redmond elite have used their online presence to produce a great deal of “knowledge” to be shared with the world. This certainly generates a certain amount of “traffic” and “content” but again, hardly creates “community.”

So what does one do to build this elusive attention getter thereby securing millions for the cause? Is it possible for it to be built out of the ground and spring to life on its own? I don’t think so. From what I’ve seen oot-n-aboot on the intrawebs, most community springs forth from users who gather around very narrowly focused ideas. Even this site, while it has elements of “web 2.0″ and “social networking” it is (IMHO) unlikely to create community until a population comes together around particular niche topics.

Community gets built like this: Blogs on topics like CMS will be read by CMS nerds like me and may be found by my colleagues around the world who will either agree or disagree with me. They will (hopefully) post their wonderful and encouraging comments on my poorly contrived drivel. They forward these nuisance comments to their buddies who in turn post more fantastic comments and perhaps even submit the content to an aggregator like digg or reddit for the world to ponder. This in turn generates an avalanche of activity on the internet to discuss the topic on our forum thereby solidifying my place in the anuls of history.

Do we build community? Does community build us? DOOD! I don’t know!

Feel free to leave your comments and get the process rolling. You know you want to.

~ Jer

Del.icio.us : blog, community, social networking, web 2.0, web 3.0