Death of online community ... again. Welcome to the digital pub.

If you are bewildered by blogs, chary of chat rooms, cheesed off with communities online, sceptical of social networks - and enervated by email - take comfort that things are changing (again). You may be able to say phoooey to all that, skip a techno-generation, and relax in the digital equivalent of your friendly neighbourhood pub. You always knew real people were what mattered, didn't you?
Of course it won't be that simple - but Robin Hamman sets off a liberating training of thought with an item entitled the death of online community as we knew it & i feel fine. It is particularly interesting when linked to the current explorations of blog communities by Nancy White following up her presentation on Internet tribes. They also been talking to each other for BBC Five Live.
Robin has been around the virtual block a few times as a researcher, commentator and manager of online communities and networks, not least in the BBC, so we should listen when he reflects on just what it takes to create online community, and its value:

We thought that if we built it, and built it right, they would come. Of course, they often did - in droves. And that's when the headaches of building and supporting expensive registration systems, content management systems, discussion platforms, exponentially growing bandwidth needs, the cost of moderation and hands on discussion hosting, etc etc all began to cause people to question the validity of the theory that all good web businesses - all business everywhere if you were a follower of the ClueTrain - needed a healthy community of users.

Robin acknowledges the many sites with lots of users - whether in forums or social networks - but doubts the long-term commercial value of past models. He also also questions how far they constitute "community", and so how far they satisfy people's social needs.

So did it work? I've been thinking about this for some time and I actually have a difficult time thinking of any large online community that functions as a single, identifiable community.

Questioning the big online community model isn't new. A couple of years ago Amy Jo Kim - author of one of the best books on developing online communities - created a few ripples by declaring that forums, email groups and chat rooms are "old-skool" with the buzz moving to blogs and social networks.
What interests me in Robin's thinking is the clues he offers to what comes next. He uses the analogy of pubs, with the big drinking halls offering cheap deals to a mass of drinkers but not attracting regulars, and comparing these with neighbourhood pubs with a regular clientele.
Robin suggests that instead of investing hugely in big places for all-comers, we should be thinking about smaller places with their own character:

So who creates the neighbourhood pubs of the social networking world? Users do. And that's my point. No longer does it make sense for big brands to try to build big online social spaces where hundreds or thousands of users engage in conversation. Instead, they should be trying to create the tools that allow niche communities to create their own social spaces using those tools.

Robin continues:

So how to navigate these stormy waters, particularly if you're not a website or brand in the web 2.0 technology business?

    * learn to engage with your users wherever they are (whatever services they are using)
    * become platform independent
    * be nimble and move with your audience(s) as it (they) move from service to service, platform to platform
    * extract value by helping your audience find third party audiences you've allied with and by learning from those third party audiences

Most of this second strategy can currently be achieved through blogging: either through setting up organisational blogs (that embrace blogging as a tool AND a technique) or by simply engaging with the blogs that already exist out there. Online community can, these days, more often then not manifest itself as a group of users who cluster around a blog or a few blogs. This is our new target audience.

Online community, at least as we once knew it, is dead and most social networking technologies will inevitably follow it there. No longer does it make sense to try to build the next big thing, nor to buy it or even figure out what it might look like. The real successes of web 2.0 will be those who put most of their effort into building relationships with user communities and who don't worry too much about, or invest too heavily in, whatever platform(s) those users happen to be using at the time.

I'll be checking in with Robin and Nancy's blogs to see if they can elaborate these new models further for us.

Comments

[Kevin Harris]

Online community is only 'dead' if you have a particular narrow definition of it. It suffered the same problem of misconceived scale that the government's neighbourhoods agenda suffers. Human beings don't tend to do 'communities' of 250,000, we tend to do comunities of up to 150. A problem with the old notion of 'online community' was its focus in a single space, and if I read it right, that is what Robin is getting at. In what used to be called meatspace, if people try to create communities a round a single amenity or space or activity, they quickly find it too narrow, it lacks variety. In the early days of community based online centres, we used to point out that not everyone will go into a community centre, not everyone will go into a school or a church or a mosque. And not everyone will go into a pub. What might 'unite' such concepts in the real or virtual worlds is a set of loose people-based informal connections, occasional formal connections, and not being expected to be united into constituing somone else's notion of 'community'.