★ Building and Running an Online Community

I presented this week at Web Content 2010 in Chicago. My presentation was about the practical issues you face when building online communities.

I have been building and working with web communities for a long time. For this talk, which was to an audience primarily consisting of content strategists and web editors, I wanted to distill as many of the lessons I've learned into a few solid pointers they could actually apply to their work.

Based on the things that people tweeted during my session, these are the big ideas worth repeating:

• If you have an audience for your content, you already have a community. They may not be posting on your site yet, but they're out there, talking to one another.
• "User generated content" is something a drug addicted robot poops! Think of the stuff that your audience creates as "member created art."
• Community isn't made up of software components - it's made up of people, and they really want to talk to one another.
• You should start simple, and build community software to enhance what your community is already doing.

You can pretend you were at my presentation in Chicago by stepping through my slides, embedded below - worth it if only for the amazing user loyalty graph Heather and Jon shared with me from Dooce.com.

- Ben Brown, Jun 9, 2010