Community Types and Terms Defined

I have now officially been working in the online community space for just over one year and there still seems to be a lot of confusion and disconnects when people are talking about their community or talking with The Community Roundtable about how being a member of TheCR Network can help them.  And it’s not surprising.  Much of the lingo and concepts are still very new in organizations and understanding what lens you view community practices through is important.  I learned that thanks to a great friend of TheCR and his response to an article I wrote.  Rachel Happe has spoken on this very subject in our Community Manager Training courses and I thought it may be helpful for all of you as well.

Exclusive

• Relatively high barriers to entry (expertise, fees, credentials)
• Community has a primary “home base” online
• Membership is clear

Examples include: Fee-based community (Weight Watchers), B2B customer community (Thomson Reuters, American Express OPEN), market research community (United)

Discrete

• Community has a primary “home base” online
• Membership is somewhat clear and based on participation

Examples include: B2C product support community (AT&T forums), consumer media community (BabyCenter), internal communities

Distributed

• Community interacts in many locations online
• Membership doesn’t really exist as such

Examples include: B2C products and services (Isis Parenting Community), B2B productsand services (Radian6 Community)

An example of how easy it is to be confused about what community is and who the audience is, you need look no further than The Community Roundtable, itself.  Like many organizations today we serve many constituencies with different types of communities:

TheCR Network is membership-based and reserved for practitioners of community management or social business and thus is an example of an exclusive  community.

We also have an internal community for employees of The Community Roundtable which is an example of a discrete community.

And we also have many constituents who are not paying members and who don’t work for us.  They include others in the community management industry like Womma, vendors in the space, many business people and organizations still learning more about community management and they include lurkers who have yet to engage with us.  We interact through this blog, a variety of social media channels and face-to-face at industry events.  This is our distributed community.

I hope this clears up some confusion.  I know it did for me.

What types of communities does your company have?