Enthusiastic individuals and corporate marketing professionals alike are desperate to learn the secret of what makes an online group grow into an effective and viable community. This is the challenge for everyone in the “connected” world.
Setting up a group is easy, we begin with the obvious elements:
- Identity
- Common interest
- Accessibility
- Organization
But that’s not the end of the story, or even the beginning – more like laying the foundations. At this stage the new group is an empty stadium, like Kevin Costner’s act of faith in the movie, Field of Dreams.
For sure the principle of ‘build it and they will come’ may well draw an early crowd but that is not a community. We need to develop the value proposition and that depends on healthy group dynamics, specifically:
- Participation
- Contribution
- Interaction
- Sensitive moderation
Even with these attributes and behaviours in place, much time and effort can still be wasted by leaders and members, if the group lacks the final magic ingredient for community: cohesion.
Cohesion is the fundamental difference between a group and a community; it is key to long-term success and depends on an effective mix of:
- Trust
- Familiarity
- Belonging
With the best will in the world, these are difficult to engender and sustain among a group of strangers, even those who have communicated online for many years. Perspective and insight can be masked by the medium.
Paradoxically for an online community, the strongest driver for cohesion is usually the outcome of physical meetings between members. Nothing beats getting together occasionally, to put faces to names and to bond the group into a community.
The Yorkshire Mafia is a great example of how to turn an online group into an effective community. In a relatively short period of time, the wiseguys and gals of the Yorkshire Mafia clustered together online, by the thousands.
They are now a non-secret society that has spread from the virtual world of LinkedIn.com into regular real world encounters; networking events which draw hundreds of members, where the rules of engagement specify: “no overt selling.”
Cohesion has grown quickly from the face-to-face sit-downs. 
Internet-based communities are not a new phenomenon; they have been around for at least a couple of decades and some virtual groups have better longevity than formally constituted organizations.
Copyright © Colin Beveridge 2010 All rights reserved.
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