The Role of Community

Community has been on my mind a lot lately, partly because as I mentioned before, I went to BlogWorld with ideablob.com. They’re an online community where people discover, discuss and share ideas (and they have a $10,000 seed money winner every month).

I spent my weekend talking about ideablob to the BlogWorld community because they recognized that in order to be a community, you have to be a part of other communities – not just your own.

One of the things the ideablob team told me was that one of the most important aspects to their community of entrepreneurs is the support that the members give to each other – the comments, the feedback, the advice, the votes for the ideas that are posted each month. It got me to thinking about the importance of community online, even the community that I have here on my blog and the comments and emails and tweets that you all send me. It provides me with the momentum to keep going.

Ever since jumping into the social media world, I’ve been steadily building my own community online, through joining other communities, just like what ideablob is talking about. It’s really the only way that I can navigate all of the sites, services and even the conferences. When I say “my people” I really mean “my community”.

I’m always astounded at how large the online community is  - I had people walk up to me at BlogWorld and after introducing myself, they filled in my last name and knew exactly who I was. I was constantly surprised. But, community is exactly like that.  Any online community is like that – we’ve all got our in-jokes and things that identify us as part of that community. Heck, use the phrase “fail whale” at a conference and you can immediately identify who the Twitter users are for example.

Just get out there and support the community! Regardless of where your community is: be it twitter, facebook, ideablob or on my blog or yours. Give someone some support! It’s good karma!

Oh, and check out my pictures from BlogWorld Expo of my favorite blobbers in Las Vegas! (image source: me!)