o Key Elements of any Virtual (Online) Community
  o Types of Online Communities
  o The Five Basic Needs of online communities
  o Etiquette: Rules to Live By
  o Community Trends
  o Four distinct stages of an Online Community
  o The Membership lifecycle
  o Online forum created by BCS student Mark Fonseca

WTGR

As more and more of the population in North America, Europe and parts of Asia and Africa gravitate to urban and suburban centers with the concepts of neighbours and neighbourhoods being eroded by transiency and mobility, many people are developing relationships that are not related to, and dependent on the immediate square miles of their geographical location for living and working.

WTGR

Communication technology developments have made it possible for people to create and sustain personal and business relationships which cross far distances. While this absence of a geographical requirement has freed people to engage in more relationships unbound by distance, it has also fostered a reduction in the former close relationship held between vendor and customer.

And so it is the case that Online Communities (which started in the chat rooms and other personal communication forums) have been picked up by online organizations as something to nuture since it leads to creating that close relationship with the customer that had been lost when we went from small towns to big cities.

WTGR

"One of the most successful business models to emerge and capitalize upon the Internet's capabilities is the creation and maintenance of Internet Communities."

Key Elements of any Virtual (Online) Community
 

	Community Members - try to create among the members a sense of ownership - that they have control over what the community does
	Community Organizer - sometimes this is technically focused - a person from an ISP, sometimes this is corporate based - a PR person from a company that produces the product in question eg. barbie.com
	Guiding Principles - rules and regulations by which people interact - see Chpt 6 in Amy Jo Kim's book "Etiquette: Rules to Live By"
	Interactivity - the ability to connect and speak with others through postings, chat, thumbnail galleries, etc. - keep barriers to entry low - inspire participants to be involved for a long time, thereby building "product evangelists"

Brian Eckert (2005)  is Vice President of Marketing for ObjectVideo. From 2001 to 2004, Mr. Eckert served as the Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Dimension Data North America.
Permission to quote was given in an email 2005 April 12th by ETroha@ObjectVideo.com. 

The Five Basic Needs of online communities page 212

Interest - there must be content which attracts participants and usually you plan your content based on the fact that this information cannot be obtained any other place
Information - there must be volume of information indexed and searchable to cover every conceivable requirement so that participants will not be drawn outside the community to other sources
Interaction - the ability to work interactively with the content helps create a sense of ownership among the participants. Ideally you want them to be contributors to the building of the community, not just people reading information posted on the pages.
Communication - there must be structure to the pages on the site which allow for message to be left and answered and there must be clearly marked contact information for the hosts so participants can be in contact with the site builders. If the community involved testimonials about experiences with a product or service the people providing the testimonials should not be selected unless they agree to provide real emial addresses, and further agree to answer emails from the community
Transactions - many communities are based on customers of a product who are very enthusiastic owners. These people are not content to own the product but they also want everybody else to know they own it - which is evidenced by the rise in North America and Europe of product brands in clothing eg. Ford trucks T-shirts, Nike wrist watches, Online communities are a great source for affiliated products and services in addition to the core product.

Rockwell has a section in Chpt 8 about communities in the business strategy. He makes the point that "rich content and a well-researched, targeted context make a site compelling, but it is the community element that makes a site a part of a person's life worth visiting repeatedly"
 

"Why communities are so interesting to companies" page 203-205

• concentration of customers "It is extremely useful to own these communities as by their very presence the members provide a mass of relevant information which makes targeted marketing possible"
• "members' profiles tell a lot about their interests and needs - which is information companies can utilize in their communication and product development"

"In a medium as fluid and as flexible as the Web, establishing and maintaining community standards can be challenging. Online culture has long been anti-authoritarian, and people in Web communities routinely do and say things they'd never dare to say in a face-to-face encounter. To complicate matters further, the tools for enforcing community ground rules are still primitive, and the laws governing cyberspace are in their early formative stages and changing rapidly"

Googling Dr. Kim in 2005 yielded many sites related to her book several years ago, but we could find no contact information dated 2004 or 2005.

"The good new is that while many online community sites whither financially, a number of niches within the online community space are faring very well, suggesting ten important trends to watch"
1) Search Communities, like classmates.com or geneology research sites
2) Trading Communities: 
3) Education Communities: Online education is booming.
4) Scheduled Events Communities:
5) Subscriber-based Communities: (qualified success)
6) Community Consulting Firms: - companies telling other companies how to do communities
7) E-mail-based Communities - some specialty clubs and groups, eg Zenriders
8) Advocacy Communities: - they do not seek profit, they just want a voice
9) CRM Communities - Customer Relationship Management
10) M&A Activities (not a good one)
 

several attempts were made to contact Jim Cashel, in order to ask permission to quote the above, through editor@OnlineCommunityReport.com  and cashel@OnlineCommunityReport.com in late 2004 and early 2005 but all emails were rejected saying recipient address cannot be delivered

Their extensive web site enthusiastically fosters online communities 
 www.cabelasoutdoors.com/community/
and they have a professional e-comsulting company that handles their community.

"Whether the focus is business-to-business, business-to-consumer or employee-to-employee, online community enables companies to achieve measurable business benefits. That's because online community, if managed effectively, allows businesses to:"
from participate.com's old website

• create
• convert
• participate
• evangelize

• Visitor - people without a strong identity to the community
• Novice - peope who need to learn the ropes
• Regular - people who are comfortable interacting and know all the features and benefits of the community
• Leader - volunteers, contractors and staff as well as highly enthusiastic "Regulars" who come to have a vested interest in the community continuing
• Elder - long-time regulars and leaders

Googling Dr. Kim in 2005 yielded many sites related to her book several years ago, but we could find no contact information dated 2004 or 2005.

security
vulnerabilities

The CMP Channel story quotes a Symantec study that says "Social networking Websites are becoming favored targets for cyber criminals taking advantage of human nature and using increasingly sophisticated toolkits "

Symantec explains "As Web applications have been more widely deployed, they have been increasingly targeted by attackers as a means to circumvent network security measures, such as IDS/IPS and firewalls,...Social networking sites have proven fruitful for attackers because they give attackers access to large numbers of people, many of whom implicitly trust that the site -- and the content on it -- are secure. Attackers are increasingly targeting social networking sites as Web users are becoming wary of unsolicited e-mail attachments and other enticements."
 

WTGR says, it is a fundamental characteristic of criminals to "go where the quarry is feeding", meaning, target victims in a place they feel safe, like the chatrooms and message boards of their favourite online community (myspace, facebook etc.) where they reveal all sorts of personal information to strangers.