Jeremiah Owyang, Part 2: The Nature of Communities
“When you are spearheading a movement, you are relying on the groundswell that happens within the community. The community is in charge.”
—Jeremiah Owyang
In this second part of a three-part interview, Jeremiah Owyang talks about the nature of communities and the role of the community manager. Most surprising take-away? You can’t rely solely on online community-building. It must be supplemented with in-person connections. In Jeremiah’s words:
“If you want to be a true advocate within your market or community, you really do need to connect with them in person. If you are serious about community, you should be an advocate, helping them, leading them, and that should be online and off.”
Listen in as I start off asking Jeremiah about the differences between online and offline interactions. The interview is a little over 8 minutes long.
Look for the last installment of our interview. Jeremiah and I talk about the unpredictability of communities, social capital, and how rewarding behavior is a stronger incentive than money.
Excellent interview – I am very much enjoying this sharing!
I agree on the extreme value that face to face events bring to community building. What really is at the core of this is building relationships and, ultimately, developing trust.
If people in a community do not trust the people and environment (safety of sharing and exposing oneself) within the community, then the degree of intimacy will only go so far. Trust enables people to be willing to share their experiences, even if they don’t feel that they are an expert yet. It also enables people to share their challenges and questions, even if they ARE an expert.
The second item that I have found to be of equal importance, is the sense of “value-add”. If the community is not producing something that is of value to the community members, then they will not engage fully, if at all. Time spent within / contributing to / consuming from the community is time not spent doing something else. If there is not a clear value-add for the individual’s work, life, values, etc. then the community will flounder and quite possibly fail.
In person meetings are an excellent way to develop relationships, work towards trust, prioritize what is of most importance (value-add), and begin to do work together that engages members. Budget for it, fight for it, but also think about ways to accomplish these things when in-person just isn’t possible (especially in the economic enviornment that we currently face).
Excellent insights! Thanks, Holly, for emphasizing why face-to-face is so important for building community. I also appreciate your point about value add. We are always making trade-offs in terms of where we spend our time and energy. Communities have to provide value in order to be worth the trade-off that individuals make to participate in them.