We have a lot of semantic issues in the social media/online space. The term community is particularly problematic because people tend to throw it around for any online group that interacts with content. The problem for me is that communities are not about content, they are about relationships. Relationships do need content/programs/conversations in order to develop – just like they do in the real world – but just because a large group of people come by regularly and comment on online content doesn’t mean there is a true community.
Now I know, a lot of people are not going to agree with me on this but here is how I roughly define some terms for collections of people:
Group: A relatively small collection of people, most of whom know each other. I would say 80%+ of group members have interacted and formed a relationship with one another.
Community: A moderate size collection of people, a large percentage (somewhere between 30 – 70%) of which know and have interacted with each other.
Network: A large collection of people who are accessible to each other in a particular location but only a small percentage of whom know each other personally – perhaps 30% or less. Networks typically contain groups or communities.
Ecosystem: Intersecting networks, communities, groups, companies, individuals, and other organizations within an environment.
Audience: A large collection of people who experience the same content and may react to it but who don’t have relationships with each other (except for those people they bring with them).
None of these collections of people are good or bad, but they each are effective for different outcomes and trying to get an audience to collaborate with each other will be challenging (not impossible, but challenging). Getting a community to drive traffic is not the most efficient mechanism. For organizations, this means understanding what outcomes are needed and what activities the target population is likely to participate in is absolutely critical. And like the image suggests, you can have groups within audiences or communities within networks – architecting your management solution (which includes tools, processes, guidelines, metrics, people, etc.) to fit your strategy is key – as well as understanding the cycle time and investment that will be required to build out that management architecture.
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