Chapter 9. Niche Online Communities Can Benefit Your Business
One primary difference between social networks and online communities has to do with the way the profiles are rendered. Veteran business blogger Lee LeFever explains it this way:
In most traditional online communities, members have profiles that may display a picture, location, recent posts and membership tenure. These profiles can provide valuable context to the community, but they are often peripheral to the discussions and remain somewhat hidden.
In contrast, social networking communities have elevated the user profile to become more like a user homepage that displays a very rich and contextual set of information. The member home pages are not peripheral to the discussions or a subset of the community; they are at the very core of the system.
Suffice it to say that social networks connect people across many niches; online communities focus primarily on one. Social networks are more about who you are, while online communities are more about the value you provide. (LeFever outlines a number of differences in his blog post, Comparing social networks to online communities, http://www.common craft.com/archives/000834.html. I recommend reading his observations if further explanation is needed.)
In this chapter we talk about different types of online communities, take a look at several specific ones, discuss what is required to ...
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