The Hitchhikers Guide to an Online Community

The topic that's on everyones tongue this week is, 'What is an online community?' According to commoncraft, 'An online community is a group of people with common interests who use the Internet (web sites, email, instant messaging, etc) to communicate, work together and pursue their interests over time.'

A community is usually seen as a group of people that live close together or have something in common with one another. An online community on the other hand expands on that by providing the opportunity for people to connect from all around the world on a particular topic, whether it be work, study or other interests, as long as it is a shared interest within the group.

An Effective Online Community

To help set the standards for an effective online community, Marisa Peacock published a post within CMSWire to help highlight some of the key features found within these communities.

Culture: It is important for a community to cultivate their own type of culture that members of the community can enjoy and encourages participation within the community

Metrics: The opportunity to monitor social engagement through analytics and other data collecting should be provided for the community creators/community.

Transparency: Freedom of speech should be allowed, with negative and positive comments both forthcoming, but at the same time, the community should be monitored for antagonistic comments, and other unpleasant comments that are not beneficial to the community.

Engagement: Everyone should benefit from the flow of conversation throughout the community, and once should even go as far as providing opportunities for innovation and crowd-sourcing. Discussions should engage members of the community.

Value: The online community should contribute value for all members which will be dependant on the scope of the community.

Conversations: Engaging with others and contributing ideas within the community is important to maintain good conversation. 

These 6 key features should be followed to maximise the efficiency of an online community.

Just some places to search for Online Communities

My Facebook friend's groups

Facebook

Facebook is one of my most used social networking sites (as it is for most) so of course it is where some of my more favourite communities reside. Facebook has the ability for anyone to create or join pages, where communities are then formed around particular likes/dislikes/etc. But I personally wouldn't say this is the best online community around (Facebook has gotten quite bad quality-wise recently).

Tumblr/other blogging sites

Blogs are usually good places to look for a thriving community. An individual can start following another blog page that appeals to them, and then can repost, like or comment on the posts made by the page, engaging with other members within the group about the topic of the post. Though I have a Tumblr page, as I said in previous posts, I'm still not confident with blogging, so I don't often use Tumblr.

Gaming Communities in Video Games

These can be found through tribes, guilds, clans or LiveFeed channels, and are usually filled with gamers looking for support or a community to engage with about games.

Some Others

A few more communities can be found in Twitter, Twitch, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus and many more. If you spend a little time trying to find them by searching keywords of a particular like or interest you have in Google, you will find gateways to possible communities you could join.

That's all folks

And with that, we've reached the end of this weeks blog. I hope you enjoyed it. Get  out there and start twittering/blogging/twitching/you-know-what-I-mean!

Until next time.
This is Brian F.
Signing Out.