Connie Bensen outlines 5 easy steps to starting an online community.
Her advice is great (it always is), but she waters down a very important message with talk of analytics, monitoring, participating and branding.
These tasks are important, paramount even, but they’re important to you, not to your community. They’re useless if you don’t have a community. Here’s my take on this:
Step 1) Launch a blog, newsletter, forums or mailing list to talk about your customers.
Step 2) Talk about your customers.
A community is a place for people like your members to communicate. The easiest way to attract your community is to talk about them. Talk about their stories, their successes and failures. Interview one or two. Make it the place for that particular group.
