July 8, 1996
Building communities
By Bob O'Donnell
As sites throughout the Web struggle to find the right combination of content,
cleverness, and presentation savvy to build their audience and earn them a coveted
position on the bookmark list of Web users everywhere, a critical thread of similarity
linking popular, useful sites has begun to emerge: a sense of community. Those sites that
create a feeling of commonality, shared interests, and involvement among its readers are
the ones building loyal audiences that keep coming back for more. And, of course, for
commercial sites, that loyal audience translates into greater opportunities for long-term
success.
This is not a terribly surprising development. Although the Web may be cloaked in a
veil of technological jargon and machinery, it's still ultimately all about people, and
people want and need to belong with others. Most often that sense of belonging and
community comes simply from a group of friends and acquaintances, sometimes it comes from
memberships in civic groups or other organizations, but at other times it comes via a
digital communications link from a computer to the rest of the world.
Nowhere has this last scenario been better exemplified than the commercial online
services. For example, America Online's staggering growth and success is due in large part
to its chat rooms and other mechanisms for online discussions. Many, many people are
spending lots of their time and money going online to participate in virtual communities
that these conversational tools create within the walls of the AOL service. (And it is
because of these successful community-building efforts that I believe the commercial
online services have reasonably healthy prospects for the future --albeit through a
different delivery mechanism -- in spite of the Web's onslaught.)
So, how are Web sites building communities? In several ways. First, the very nature of
the content included on a site starts to build a community because the Web is a very
self-selective environment. For example, if you create a site about acoustic guitars (or
any other specific interest), the only people who are going to intentionally visit it are
those interested in acoustic guitars (or whatever the subject happens to be). In addition,
those acoustic guitar enthusiasts who visit regularly will be drawn to the site not only
by the content itself, but by the feeling that they belong there. Their special interest
makes them feel like they're part of a club of similar, like-minded individuals.
The next step is to build on the feeling of belonging and engage
visitors/readers/members in online information- and opinion-sharing via threaded
discussion groups, real-time chats, and other types of interactive mechanisms, much like
the commercial online services do. The important difference is that instead of discussing
wide-ranging topics intended for a general audience, the focused, community-building sites
concentrate on very specific topics that are of interest to its members. General interest
topics are also discussed, but through the eyes of the special interest group's specific
wants and needs.
Thanks to our highly focused content and our active Forums section, InfoWorld Electric
fits the model of a community-building site. We're actively working to engage our highly
targeted audience of IS professionals both via InfoWorld's unique angle, or
filter, on computer industry news and via discussions on topics near and dear to their
(your) hearts and minds. For example, this week's mix of Forums includes discussions on
how to avoid junk e-mail in the corporate environment and reader gripes about IT industry
vendors, as well as ongoing technical discussions of the pros and cons of Linux, in-house
software development practices, and more. If you haven't yet tried out our Forums, I urge
you to do so. (Note that access to our Forums section requires you to register -- yet
another part of the community-building process -- and obtain a username and password.)
Our overall goal at InfoWorld Electric is to give you much more than just a quick hit
on the news; we want to build an environment for information-sharing in which you can feel
active and engrossed. We've made some important steps toward that goal and look forward to
implementing more.
©
Copyright 1996, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
155 Bovet Road, San Mateo, CA 94402. Further reproduction is prohibited.
