What do the words community, network, and group mean to you?
September 16th, 2009 by Jeremy Haile
One of my coworkers, MD, passed around an interesting article a few days ago. It argues that the terms community and network are often incorrectly applied to websites where people just “come by regularly and comment on online content”. It says communities are about the relationships of the people involved, not the content. The author then goes on to provide her definitions for the words group, community, network, ecosystem, and audience.
I agree with the article to some extent – the words community and network are buzz words that many companies carelessly use to describe any website that allows people to post comments. On the other hand, I think the definitions provided by the article are too narrow. It says that for a website to properly be called a group or community, it must contain a large percentage of people who know and have interacted with each other.
I’ll take a stab at my own definitions here:
- A group is a set of people who are gathered together because they have a cause, purpose, or trait in common – they may or may not know each other very well, but the group gives them a place to interact and meet people that have things in common.
- A community is (according to the dictionary) people who live in the same place (e.g. a neighborhood community), have common interests (e.g. a scientific community), or form a distinct segment of society (e.g. the Muslim community) An online community is a place where people who share these common interest can go to meet and interact.
- Network has to do with the relationships of people you know. Everyone has a personal network of people they know, and online communities usually encourage user’s to reach out to their network and draw new members into the community.
One of Wildfire’s goals is to help our clients build their online grassroots community. Certainly some users will already know each other, but it is a community because it provides a place for supporters to interact with other people related to a common cause or purpose. Our communities allow users to connect with the organization and meet new people who are passionate about the things they are passionate about. We let users join organized teams in their area and also to self-organize into groups to meet and communicate with other people who have common interests.
My argument is that communities are definitely about building relationships, but don’t imply some percentage of people know each other. Instead it’s about a common interest (a cause, brand, campaign, nonprofit, band, movie, whatever…) that allows people to interact with other people that maybe they’ve never met, but share a common passion and purpose. Our goal is to help organizations reach out to that community and make it easier and more fun for supporters to find and help the communities that they care about.
What do the words community, network, and group mean to you? Is it about the relationships between your users? Is it about providing tools that let people communicate and interact? Is it about the common cause or purpose? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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RachelHappe