I'm on the seated chest machine, desperately trying to get into shape for all the eating that's going to come at Christmas. On the machine next to me is Jake.
That machine is called the vertical butterfly. It bears about as much resemblance to a butterfly as an M-1 tank bears to a tobacco moth. And Jake is a gym rat. He's moving plates approximately equivalent to my entire body weight up and down while he grunts and sweats. He looks over at me.
"They're closing this place on Christmas. I was hoping to get in a really good workout that day.%
Yep, the folks who run the gym are closing down for Christmas. The idea is that theyâll give the staff the whole day to spend time with their families and loved ones. But it's a problem for Jake. Jake was planning on doing a really good workout that day.
There are several folks like Jake at the gym where I go. After awhile, you learn that the gym is pretty much of their life. They spend lots of time here. They meet people here. This is their community, their home, the place where they find people like themselves.
Jake's problem is bigger than just not getting in a big workout at Christmas. His problem is that with the gym closed, a significant part of his life is shut off. It isn't just that he won't be able to pump more iron. With the gym closed, it's harder for him to see his friends.
There's a lot of talk these days about what constitutes community, what its value is, how you create it on the Net. I really don't think it's a difficult proposition.
If you want to have a community, you have to have two things. You have to have frequent and mutually beneficial interaction. And, you have to have some self-identification of the participants.
For Jake, that happens at the gym. He comes here a lot. He meets lots of folks. Part of his identity is tied to being the sort of fellow who has a hand-tooled, personalized leather weight belt.
I go to the gym, too. When I'm in town, I'm here almost every day. I don't like to work out. I just like how I feel and how productive I am when I do it regularly. So I do it. I cannot imagine ever either lifting the weight that Jake can lift or having a hand-tooled, personalized weight belt.
For Jake, the gym is part of community. It has the interactions and he sees himself as a gym rat. For me, the gym is just part of my life.
On the other hand, I belong to a community of people who speak professionally. We're scattered all over the world. That's a good thing and a bad thing.
It's a good thing because just about anywhere I go, there's usually someone that I know. We can get together for dinner, or for a beer, or just for a quick local phone call.
It's a bad thing, though, because you don't run into those people all the time like Jake runs into his friends at the gym. So a lot of the relationship has to do with what we do on the phone, and by mail, and by e-mail, and by following each other's careers in the press.
For me, the speaking community is a community. I have lots of beneficial interactions with the people in it. I imagine myself as a speaker.
If you're going to build a community Online, you have to have those two things as well. There must be lots of beneficial interaction.
Think about the theme song from the long-running television show, Cheers. It's about going to a place where everybody knows your name. Whenever Norm came in the front door, everybody chorused "Hi Norm," and waited to see what he'd say next.
When I was a kid, there was a candy store on the corner. The guy who ran it, Mr. Morris, knew who I was. He knew the kind of candy that I liked. He knew who my Mom was. And a lot of times, he'd suggest to her that she might want to take home some of my favorite candy for me when she thought she was just there to buy the paper.
Is Cheers a community? What about Mr. Morris's candy store? I'd submit to you that Cheers probably is because the people who went there regularly identified themselves as part of it, but Mr. Morris's probably wasn't because we never thought of ourselves as the folks who buy stuff at Mr. Morris's store.
That's one of the lessons of Online communities. You don't create community because you have to do it to sell to people effectively. Down at Morris's candy store, they were selling without creating community. We went back because the experience was good. Mr. Morris knew us. He knew our families. He didn't forget what we liked. And every now and then he did something nice, like offering me an egg cream from the fountain for free.
The lesson from years of commercial enterprise is that a good buying experience brings people back. It's not community, but it brings people back.
So what's all the "buzzä about community? Think about Cheers, and think about Jake. In both cases, there's a community going. There's frequent, mutually beneficial interaction. There's identification.
But, in the case of Cheers, what we've got is a commercial community. Creating the community keeps people hanging around, and makes them comfortable and builds their trust. And those things help when you want to sell them stuff -- like more beer.
So let's look at the three possible ways we can put these pieces together.
With Cheers, we've got a fully functional commercial community. There's frequent, mutually beneficial interaction. There's identification. And all of that is tied to the commercial purpose, which is selling beer and other drinks and foods across the bar. They're all of a piece.
At Mr. Morris's candy store, we have an effective commercial enterprise. Lots of candy gets sold. People feel comfortable there; and they have lots of trust, but they don't see themselves as part of that community. Everything's there but the self-identification.
Then there's Jake down at the gym. There are lots of those interactions. They're beneficial. Jake sees himself as part of the community there. But it's not a commercial community. The gym doesn't sell more to Jake or to me. They don't make more money from Jake because it's part community for him. We pay the same monthly rate.
Here's the bottom line if you're looking at building an Online commercial community. You have to keep your commercial purpose firmly in mind. It's easy to start doing lots of things that look good and are real warm and fuzzy but don't really help you achieve your business objectives.
With that said, there are lots of things that we know you can do Online to make it possible for a community to develop. You can provide ways for people to interact with you, with each other, and with information. You can make the experience the wonderful experience of walking into Mr. Morrisâ store while making the technology that makes it possible transparent to the visitor. You can build in lots of interaction, play, and sharing.
Then you wait. Because communities are not designed in and created from the outside. If we've learned nothing from the planned communities of the last several decades in architecture, we've learned that we can create the environment where communities are possible. We've learned that we can create the mechanisms that can help community to happen. But we cannot create community. Only the people who choose to be members can do that.
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 3/31/01
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