BlogIndiana Conference Notes and Presentation

This past weekend I spoke at the first BlogIndiana conference in Indianapolis. I led a session on blog monetization and was part of a panel about building a community. Kudos to the organizers on a great event.

I wanted to share some additional thoughts from the building a community panel:

• You can’t build a community, just like you can’t build love. You can make it easier for people to love you (the closest thing to “building”), but in the end you can’t control it.
• You make it easier for a community to form by recognizing why they form and reducing those frictions.
• What do people get out of being in a community? It has to do with all parts of human nature that drive people to be a part of any type of community. Interactions with other people, self spotlight, satisfaction from contributing to an argument, etc.
• You can maximize these drivers by making it easy for members to communicate with each other, contribute to the dialogue, receive credit for their contribution, receive something tangible (like traffic), etc.

Also from the panel: I mentioned Hugh Macleod’s Stormhoek wine story and how social media concepts were used (back in ’04/’05) to promote this small wine company. There’s also the important point about how social objects (like blogs) foster communities. You can read the Stormhoek story here, social objects in Hugh’s words here, and more.

Below is the powerpoint (yuck) from my session. I’m trying a new embed service since SlideShare was down. I’m not sure if I’m happy with it… it messed with the formatting.

Tagged as: BlogIndiana, Community, presentation