Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business

Chapter 14. The E-Community Strategy (Go to Their Party or Throw Your Own)

If the blogosphere holds millions of blogs, the Web has hundreds of thousands of e-communities. Back in Chapter 7, in the discussion of building your own community, I defined e-communities as sites where people aggregate around a common interest and often includes professional content. Whether the common interest is business or personal, people join these communities and return to them regularly because they offer news, information, entertainment, or all three. In this chapter, I want to talk about how you can connect with somebody else's e-community or build your own e-community to reach the people who matter to your business.

Thousands of e-communities are already drawing sizable audiences, with new sites being established daily. The pioneer—and prototypical—e-community was Slate, which Microsoft founded in 1996. Michael Kinsley, Slate's founding editor, says that for the first few years it was referred to as "Slate, Microsoft's experimental online magazine that some people read on their computer via the Internet...." Today they say, "Slate reported yesterday...."^[74] Slate, now owned by the Washington Post, is no longer an e-community but has evolved into The Slate Group, an online publishing unit with several specialized news and opinion sites for targeted audiences.

By my definition, the main Slate site has a number of e-communities: news and politics, arts and life, business and technology, health and ...