Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a fascinating amount of connection between a number of folks writing and thinking about communities and relationships, and their impact on how customers and companies interact. A few pointers:
Jake McKee, CommunityGuy
“A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.”
Jennifer Rice, BrandShift
“I see community as a group of people who come together and interact based on a shared interest. But that community may not result in relationships, and it may dissolve in a day. Or an hour.” (I disagree with this.)
Jake, Followup #1
“I think you have to make a distinction between “community activities” and “community”. Community happens when all parts of the community definition are fulfilled. When only parts of the definition are fulfilled, community activities happen. Epinions, Amazon, and ThinkGeek all do these very well, but since they’re missing the “form relationships” piece of the community definition, I wouldn’t call them communities.”;
and a clear, wonderful distillation of the whole concept (emphasis added):
“Too often these days, businesses are seen by their consumers as entities rather than the groups of people that they really are. Small companies are often the bastions of interesting, non-traditional business. Small business either doesn’t care or doesn’t know enough to be risk adverse. They also have more fun, and as such, come across as a group of humans, and not some big floating head in the sky out to steal your money.”
Lee LeFever, CommonCraft
“Community building is not about tools like message boards and blogs. Community building is about people- about developing trust, relationships and emotional connections. Community is more tool-agnostic than you might think- if the people want to create a community, it will happen.”
Jake, Followup #2 and Followup #3:
“At it’s core, asking the question “What is community?” is inherently flawed. What we’re really been talking about Social Connection – an umbrella that covers a range of activities and interactions…We can even think about this as a spectrum. On the left end of the spectrum, we have lightweight, short-term, or loose connections. On right end of the spectrum you have deep, long-term, relationships.”
Tomi T Ahonen and Alan Moore are coming out with a book that seems related, as well. (I love the concept, and therefore I hope that the content is able to overcome the buzzword generator. “Generation-C?” Puh-lease.)
Wonderful, heady stuff. Maybe this needs a fourth level:
Transactions => Conversations => Relationships => Community