Online communities are all about people (it’s our blogiversary)
It’s almost a year since we started the blog here at FreshNetworks. When we first did it was a way of sharing with a wider audience the discussions and thoughts we have internally, in our team meetings and across the office on a wet Wednesday afternoon. Although I write most of the posts, they actually reflect the discussions, ideas and thoughts that we have had right across the team. Sharing our thoughts on social media, online communities, market research and online research communities and everything related to it.
If you’re new to our blog (or have just been a long-time reader) I thought it would be interesting to reflect on what we’ve written, and after the proliferation of word-clouds for Obama’s Inauguration Speech, I thought I’d create the same for the FreshNetworks blog. Take a look below (thanks to the lovely people at Wordle) and see if you think this reflects what we’ve written and you’ve read over the last twelve months.
For me, it’s great to see the prominence of two words: people and social. We write about online communities and social media. That’s what we know and what we do. But in doing so it’s important to remember that what we’re really writing about is people and how they interact in a social environment. It’s why we think that we need to focus on how we build and manage online communities. In a good online community, the technology should be invisible, it’s about the people and the way we work together in a social environment than makes the difference.
More of that in the next twelve months.
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Some more reading
- Social Media Is Still Only Social If You’re Alone
- How the market research industry should embrace communities
- Why Social Media Can Fail (And Why It Won’t)
- Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them
- Your online community should work offline as well
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Clerkendweller:
Happy blogiversary, but I think you’ve missed something by accident in your excitement. It may well be “about the people and the way we work together in a social environment”, but we do have to live with legislation and things like copyright law. If I’m not mistaken, you might be missing a link to where you generated the word cloud!
It looks like Wordle and includes “wordle” in the image filename – so if it came from Wordle, it needs to be attributed http://www.wordle.net/faq#use
Cheers
26 January 2009, 3:49 pmClerkendweller:
Thanks for adding the link!
26 January 2009, 4:31 pmJake:
Interesting thinking about the different ways in which the sources use the word ‘people’. Obama uses it to communicate a mass opinion on behalf of the nation – e.g. ‘we the people’, ‘the American people’.
Blogs often use it to generalise ‘people like to talk’, ‘people think that…’, ‘people seem to be saying’.
At least we’re moving away from using the term ‘consumers’ to describe groups of people though. Perhaps in ten years we’ll look back and laugh at how we defined ourselves in that way.
27 January 2009, 2:49 pm