I guess my point here is that there is a continuum of what it means to trust and the more complex the product and the more critical it is to me personally or for my business, the more I want to have a pretty deep relationship with the company that provides the product/service and their other customers.

Getting back to the group, community, network, ecosystem – I see that as a continuum of trust as well – kind of like a marketing funnel. But Tamsen, I think you are right that there is a matrix and there is another overlay to what it means to be a group/community/etc. – it maybe a “if A + B, than Z” but “if A than null” (sorry being a bit wonky here).

A lot to ponder – and I certainly don’t have the definitive answer and, in fact, from a business perspective I would say the person that manages any of those types of things (often called a community or social media manager) uses many of the same techniques but may prioritize their activities a bit differently.

I’d be curious to hear Jon’s and Heather’s thoughts on how they’d define those various levels…and even more curious to see how those could intersect with the term you outline.

I agree with the other comments – nice work on taking a first stab at this – how would you characterize a ‘back-channel’ community, such as one that forms around hashtags on Twitter for conferences/summits, etc?

Clearly, there are going to be some in that community who know each other, a lot that probably don’t, and some that come into the community after the fact and are just surfing through the artifacts.

The reason I ask is I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how these ‘tidal wave’ communities form, disperse, and then toss their info remnants to the shore to be picked up later.

Thanks!

I think it’s great that you took a crack at this.

While I agree with your intent behind saying “it’s not about content it’s about relationships,” (yes the word community is thrown around meaninglessly) I think Jon has an important point. The degree and quality of connection matters a great deal and is the least measure-able thing. This gives businesspeople agita.

Trust and reliability are major goals. I think they are even goals for big companies saying they just want awareness and visibility. Really? Do they want a lot of visibility because their product poisoned someone?

I think the language getting mushed up is part of us all getting much more aware that we all often mean different things when we say stuff. The only way to get clear on whether or not we are meaning the same thing is a lot of checking in and trust building.

The web and business are just revealing our relational nature to people who have lived in their left brains.

As a meeting and event professional and a nonprofit employee, I would put a different spin on these definitions.

Group – any number of members (members of a community, a nonprofit, a network, etc.) considered a unit.

Audience – could mean a lot of things. My audience at a face-to-face event actually does have relationships with each other, as they are typically the members of our nonprofit association. They’ve gathered to be spectators, listeners and participants with our content and our content experts. And, they are all related as they work in the same industry so they know each other. Sometimes our audience experiences the same content. Sometimes segments of our audience experience the same content in smaller groups. Sometimes they don’t. Our community is our audience.

Network – for us it is an interconnected system of people, not defined by physical location. We also believe that education is moving to networked learning, horizontal, collaborative, peer-to-peer sharing.

Ecosystem – for us our face-to-face meetings and our virtual experiences are all part of a larger ecosystem that connects with the members of our community. Sometimes we help our network connect with each other. Each virtual or face-to-face event is one touchpoint with a larger context of our community and our association’s mission.

Building relationships requires interaction, communication, and engagement so… yes, different types of groupings with different degrees of relationship density imply very different levels of engagement. I believe it’s the relationships, however, that are the main determinate of level of trust and deepness of engagement. Again, that may not be what a company needs – if a big B2C is looking for awareness and visibility, a high relationship density is not important but a broad network is.