When we first moved into our house a few months ago, I was talking over the fence (two fences, actually) with one of our new neighbors. He noticed my Geneva College t-shirt and mentioned that his brother attended that college. I responded that it was where I had done my undergraduate work, and was from the Class of 1983 (yes, it has been 30 years!).
A few weeks later, the doorbell rang, and I discovered it was our mailman who had a package to deliver. He noticed that I was wearing that same shirt and asked me about it. I told him I was an alum, and he informed me that his brother had been a graduate student there. Two inquiries about the same t-shirt, for a college about 4 hours away. Not bad. Now just yesterday, the mailman rang the doorbell again. Over the past few months we’ve struck up a few conversations because of that first meeting, but this time I noticed he was wearing a Philadelphia Flyers hat while making his rounds. As a die hard Philly sports fan, I commented on it, and we got to chatting about hockey, and I relived the good old days of 1974 and 1975 when the Flyers last won Stanley Cups.
The mailman comes to my house 6 days a week. He rings the doorbell maybe twice a week. The sum total of all of our brief meetings over the past few months is probably about 30 minutes of time. And yet we have gotten to know things about each other. My neighbor two doors down and I have only chatted for about a total of an hour over the past few months, in small increments. But we are getting to know each other.
This is how communities are built. We get to know each other, perhaps a little at a time, but we do so because of commonalities. Something brings us together. For me and these two men, it was a college t-shirt and a sports logo hat. Pretty simple. Our relationships might not go any further than this, but a lot of that is based on what we do with those commonalities. We can each determine whether we want to cultivate the relationships or take them further.
Communities are always built on something in common: a geographical location, a hobby, an interest, a religious belief, a political belief, even a sports team. Take any group of people, and community, and you’ll find at least one thing that holds them together, even when they might be other parts of their life that very disparate. Two people who are on very opposite ends of the political spectrum might be brought together over love of the same type of music or same type of food.
That’s community.
As businesses create their online communities, they often become that common factor that brings us together. Our love for your product or business. Think of products like Apple or Starbucks. Their fans have created communities built around those brands.
Even your business is something that brings people together. Think about the things that bring customers to your door. What is it that brings them in and brings them back? It could be your products, or a specific feature of a product. It could be your level of customer service. Or, it could be a combination of things. Translate that to your online properties and you’ll find it easier to build your social communities on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever platform you are using.
And those commonalities might even go beyond your business; they might relate to a common lifestyle that relates to your business or business category.
Examine your offline community and find ways to bring that online. Use those same commonalities as you interact with your fans and followers.
via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/online-communities/building-online-communities-offline-way-0628691?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=building-online-communities-offline-way
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