A lot is being said about community these days, but what is your definition of YOUR community?
Is it feasible to actually consider your 10,000 friends on MySpace or even your 500 associates on LinkedIn your “community?” Is your community the readers of your blog, or perhaps the users of your online forum for your Airwolf fan site. (Jan Michael Vincent was awesome!)
Community means a lot of things to a lot of people, and as we talk about leveraging community for your web site, business, widget, thingamajigger – whatever, it is important to define your scope of what your community is and what you want it to be.
For me, my community on this web site is its readers. As the community grows, hopefully with more interaction, then that community will spill over into sub-communities who will naturally “glob” together based on their own personal favorites and experiences.
There is no magic number, but having 10,000 or more friends (many have made it a contest and have millions) is more of an audience than a community. The conversation, whatever there is, gets stuck in the static.
Who is your community? And are they really an audience?
