photo credit: Gord Bell

If you are like me, you have many different social streams of information that you pay attention to.

These streams usually contain information from people that you have subscribed to in some way, whether you call it friending, following or something else.

When we interact via platforms that have some sort of relationship system, where people can add you to the list of people they want to pay attention to, you can add them to your list and we are notified when people add us to their list, there is a personal dynamic.

This is because we all like to have people pay attention to us. When we say, “hey, I want to pay attention to you,” and that person then tells us, “awesome, I want to pay attention to you, too!,” it makes us feel good.

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Do you want the secrets to building community online? I’ve got them. Meet me in this back alley over here and I’ll give them to you for a price. But, let’s keep them just between us. We wouldn’t want the common people to know.

If anyone ever tells you this, run away from them. There are no secrets. There are just things you haven’t learned yet. Are those secrets? I don’t know.

I receive emails, regularly, from people offering to improve my search engine optimization (SEO). They promise that they have the SEO secrets and that they’ll hook me up. Generally, we regard these people as spammers that lack credibility and are looking to take advantage of us. Why should online community be any different?

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Back in June, I wrote about Turntable.fm, the social DJ service and music community. Since then, I have spent countless hours playing music on Turntable.fm and have accumulated a good number of points and fans. 1,550 and 137, respectively.

According to ttDashboard, a site that tracks some interactions with the site, that places me 1,756th and 345th in those categories overall. From my time spent on the site, I know I have an abnormally high number of fans for my point total. I’ve seen DJs with double my points that don’t have half my fans.

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photo credit: aresauburn™

Bruce Stephenson (@FamilyPhoto on Twitter) asked: “[What is the] best way to start to participate when new to a forum?”

Thank you for the question, Mr. Stephenson.

I am going to tackle this from the perspective of an individual wanting to participate in a forum for personal reasons, such as a passion for a specific topic. If you are looking to do this for commercial reasons, check out my guide to brand engagement on forums and communities that you don’t own.

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Online communities can be very powerful. When a group of people gather regularly around a topic or interest, especially when that topic or interest is directly related to your company or a product that you sell, an established online community can represent a great opportunity to engage with your core audience.

That is why a lot of companies try to engage within an online community by joining and “participating.” But, it is sometimes done in a way that actually has a negative effect because the company either tries to blatantly take advantage of the community or, at least, participates in a manner that suggests that is what they are doing.

Online communities and forums are a different beast than more general, mainstream social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the like. Each online community is like it’s own country, with it’s own culture, laws and societal norms. The backlash that a company can face from disregarding these norms can be painful and that is why a lot of companies are afraid of engaging in these more controlled spaces.

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photo credit: the euskadi 11

Sometimes, people get caught up in thoughts that are very limiting, due to their own jealousy, insecurities, a lack of understanding or something else.

One great example of this is a comment I once heard someone make. It was about a celebrity, I forget who. The person said that the celebrity didn’t “deserve” their followers.

The implication being that this person had been on Twitter for a long time, had “worked hard” for their followers and now this celebrity just showed up and in a day or so, they have tens of thousands of followers. This is bad, petty thinking.

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Empire Avenue is a stock market where you can purchase shares in your favorite individual or corporate social media presences. I’m on the service with the ticker symbol IFROGGY.

My friend Damond Nollan has been riding the Empire Avenue wave. He’s a popular user and has dug in pretty deep. I asked him to write a guest post for me and he talked about how you can build community around Empire Avenue and further engage with the people you encounter on EA.

Empire Avenue (EA) is a relatively new social network built upon gamification. On the surface, the site is about buying and selling shares in people using eaves, EA’s virtual currency. However, if you look a little deeper, you may notice a lively community that actively engages both on and off site. In this article, we will explore the Empire Avenue community and learn from existing builders.

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Speaking of listening to feedback from your customers online, storied video game developer and publisher Capcom has done more than just listen – they created an online community, the Devroom, where fans and aspiring game developers can help them develop “Mega Man Legends 3,” the upcoming Nintendo 3DS game, the latest entry in one of the company’s most important franchises.

Not only can community members participate in polls to help decide game features, character designs and more, but they can offer ideas and submit design and visual elements that will actually end up in the game. Not only are they running a community for North America, but they are also running a similar one in Japan.

Capcom’s efforts were spotlighted in the June issue of Nintendo Power by Chris Hoffman, who discussed some of the submissions that were accepted and featured an interview with “Mega Man 3 Legends” producer Tatsuya Kitabayashi, Capcom community manager Joveth Gonzalez (who has since moved over to Zynga) and Devroom community liaison Greg Moore.

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photo credit: lisahumes

There are some who believe that the feedback that is offered on online communities, about their product, isn’t worth their attention because it’s only a small percentage of their customer base that may or may not be reflective of a larger majority.

The continuation of this belief is that business decisions shouldn’t be made based upon what is said in an online community or on the feedback being offered because these people are talking to themselves and simply participating an en echo chamber. (This ignores that online communities, and the people within them, can have a lot of influence beyond just their own community, but I’m going to skip past that as it’s not the point of this post).

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photo credit: Justin Sternberg

I have grown to become very careful about my usage of the word “friend,” when I am talking about other people. A lot of people have really diluted this term to the point where, for some, it means “person that I once had a pleasant conversation with” or “someone I paid to do something for me” or “person who helped me that time.”

Though I do slip up once in a while, when I call someone my friend, believe me when I say that. There are differing levels of friendship and I have friends who I am closer to than others and who I trust with more than others, but if I call someone my friend, I’ve established some form of a meaningful relationship with them, in public and/or in private.

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