The top three reasons that small business owners avoid developing their online marketing plans and stay away from social media is lack of capital, lack of time, and lack of skills. This is where a blog will fit your needs perfectly—it is relatively cheap to incorporate into your site, requires very little time, and you do not need any special technical skills or writing expertise to use it. View this guide for tips on getting started with a blog and for best practices on maintaining it.

What is most important to having a successful blog is to understand that it is like hosting a networking event on your site, around the clock. People can read what you’ve written, which should be entertaining and informative. They can also participate by asking questions and posting comments. This can become a sounding board for revealing your areas of expertise and truly helping potential customers. It can also be a place for your current customers to tout your goods or services.

The beauty of the blog is that it does not need to be a picture perfect dissertation of what you do; as a matter of fact, it is better if it is more conversational and speaks to the masses. You can also have fellow employees or business associates write posts to expand your reach. One cardinal rule of blogging is to not only start this conversation, but to respond as well—keep the interaction moving.

Learn more and get started today!

There was also the countervailing sentiment, from folks nearly sunk by paywalls the last time around, as well as some more of the usual suspects.

I myself have little to add on the subject of paywalls, other than to repeat some truisms about paid content:

* It depends on your business. Porn, the Wall Street Journal, Carfax, iStockphoto, some subscription e-mail newsletters manage to do it — each warrants further investigation. Quality, exclusivity, timeliness, canonicity, access, legitimacy and authority all play into it, but there’s no universal secret sauce you can sprinkle on your content to make people pay.

* You need to balance what you give away and what you charge for, and you also have to make sure your stuff is accessible via search — even, as people keep rediscovering with the WSJ, if it opens you up to free riders. (It’s likely that many people who do the free workaround would never pay, anyway, and that at least some people who might use the workaround are just too lazy to do it and simply pay up, or value the content more because they pay for it.)

* Eventually, somebody, somewhere has to pay

The Beer Is Not the Content
Now, in my previous foray, “Can Communities of First-Run Fans Save Appointment Television?” I speculated on the role of community in getting people to pay premiums so they could be the first viewers of TV & movie content (allowing them to participate in discussions and also not be afraid of spoilers).

However, I was in a bar the other night, and I realized that there are plenty, much more accessible examples of people who pay premiums for community. They’re just not online — it’s called “Paying $5 for a draft beer in a bar when you can get a whole six-pack (or more, depending on your tastes and brand) for the same amount.”

Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but you get the idea. In this case, the beer is not the content you’re paying for — it’s the access to the community of bar-goers. And it’s a heck of a premium.

So just what is it you’re paying for? Largely, the promise of something that we can describe any number of ways, but for the sake of propriety let’s just call it it “companionship.” At the very least, you usually don’t want to drink alone. Similarly, it’s why people hang out in coffee shops — to get a change of venue and context, to see and be seen, hear and be heard, to tap into a sense of activity.

So how does that translate to getting people to pay for stuff online? That’s a very good question, and I, uh, don’t have an answer for that just now. A piece of it is the driver behind online gaming, as demonstrated by MMORPGs and gaming networks like XBox Live, because you’re ostensibly paying for the gaming experience, though a big part of it is paying for access to the activity around which the community coalesces (even if a lot of that actual community activity occurs on third-party sites).

I will have to think about this some more, preferably after changing context and relocating to a bar somewhere. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on this, please leave a comment below.

Overnight something wholly amazing happened.
They opened their email box one morning a month into the passively pushed campaign and found they had, honest to Bob, over 7,000 submissions requesting to be a part of the campaign. Emails poured in from all over the nation taking part in the submission. We all clamored to the marketers’ desk to see this with our own eyes. An email box so overloaded with requests it called to mind the commercial of the new business that puts its store online and the orders just keep going up, and up, and up. Just like the emails that continued to pour in.

From joy to panic.
Some thought it was spam. Some were excited at the potential of something they did being that “viral”. Some freaked out at how they were going to service all of the requests with a limited supply.

With one of their web team helping, I started looking through some of the emails to see if we could detect signs of spamming. We couldn’t find any that were that obvious. The submission forms were filled out were each unique, accurate, and different, that the only thing that kept the curiosity of it being spam was the frequency of how these came in. It was roughly twenty emails a minute with each second a part from each other.

The Google Search is strong with this one.
So there we sat, debating on what to do, and I thought “Google will have the answer”. I threw the name of the campaign between some quotes in Google’s search box and hit send. My screen, and Google’s Search results, were maxed out with Freebie Sites, sites that do nothing but list where to find, and how to get, free stuff online, listing the “Free Gift” that came with campaign and how to get it.

I figured, “if it’s already this deep into Google…where else could it be”. I turned m search to the tools of Social Media. The links started popping up on Twitter with a link back to the directions on how to get the “Free Gift”. It was in different spots all throughout Social Media.

In a very short time, less then ten hours, the “Free Gift” had spread like wild fire. It was time for some damage control.

From excitement to frustration
From there, I created a timeline of when the first Freebie Site listed the campaign, which linked off of it, when other posts picked it up, and cross referenced it with when the emails came in and how often they spiked. Yeah, I know, I’m a geek. My wife reminds me constantly. Sure enough, the spike in email requests coincided with each time the campaign appeared on a Freebie Site.

This wasn’t spam after all, but an army of people who collectively thought the “Free Gift” was worth their time to blog about the “Free Gift” and share how sign up for it. They rallied their own troops, got the message out, and took action on it. This was truly an example of the kind of Viral Marketing companies’ dream of!

Yet notice nothing in that last paragraph talks about the connection with the campaign, the belief in the goal, sharing the message of the campaign over the free gift, or any positive remarks about the non-profit’s effort?

With learning that submissions were still flooding in, we closed down the submission request box. I sent emails to the Freebie Sites letting them know what the intention of the campaign was and how we hoped they update their info. Some did and thanked us. Some ignored us. I sent a few emails to those who submitted letting them know what happened. Some did and thanked us. Some got frustrated and said that they did what the website said and they wanted their “Free Gift” anyway. Some ignored us.

The moral of the story, kids.
This outcome was not what they expected, or intended, when they created their marketing campaign. They just wanted to add a little value for being a part of it. Those online saw the value not in supporting the campaign, but just filling out whatever they needed to get the free item they wanted.

Rather than give a long, lengthy explanation, here are the top five things the non-profit quickly learned:

1. Be proactive on learning the reason once you find a negative reaction to your campaign.a. You could have unintentionally created it. If you sit back and blame the people doing the very thing you asked them to, but for a different reason than you intended…you get nowhere.
2. Accept the mistake, learn from it, and work with it instead of running away from it.a. It’s safe to say, that on the next campaign this will be something that will be brought up and avoided.
3. Don’t give into our initial fear.a. Fear can cause you to assume your first reaction is the best one. Sometimes that’s not the case. Imagine what would happen if they thought they were spammed instead of doing the research?
4. Find out what worked, what didn’t, and, depending on your outcome, how you can either duplicate that later on or never let it happen again.Clearly the free gift had value to people. Is there something that they could leverage in this?
5. When people ask for your free gift that does not mean they are interested in you.a. Free gifts are great. They little items, that shouldn’t break the bank, that if well done should spark conversation or curiosity. They should not be a crutch to get people interested in you or your company.

I say, give “Free Gift” away, but don’t let the value of the gift be greater than the message. There are some really big marketing lessons in this that came to light. What, life lessons, have you learned from you marketing experiences?

Until next time, stay wicked.

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Upholding the grand tradition of new media titles not being particularly clear, there was a lot of speculation as to what the Times saw as the role of a social media editor. It was pretty safe to assume that it wasn’t simply an editor covering the social media beat — while I’m sure it would have generated a lot of ongoing buzz and attention from the usual suspects, the rest of the world probably wouldn’t have cared a whit.

Others speculated that it was a glorified newsroom Twitter cop role, though in an interview with Fishbowl NY, Ms. Preston said that… well, it’s still hard to say. I would categorize it as a social media integration / coordination / evangelization role. It’s not all that dissimiliar from what I, and others like me, have done and are doing, save for her extensive journalism background.

Wither the “Telephonic Media Editor”?
This little episode brought to the front of my mind a little inner dialog I’ve been having: What’s the shelf-life / half-life of social media as a standalone expertise? Put another way, how much longer are we going to be faced with the scourge of the “social media / social marketing consultant”?

Being as how I basically am one, this subject has more than a little interest to me.

If you’ve had the misfortune to let me bend your ear during an event, you’re probably heard my theory: As social media tools pervade society, and especially as we have people growing up using these tools and methods natively, the standalone social media expert role will eventually be subsumed into previously-established categories. The current leaders of marketing, customer support, communications / public relations may stand out at first, but eventually every arm of an organization will have a piece of the action relevant to what they do.

My analogy — We don’t have consultants who have to teach organizations how to use the telephone effectively.

Having said that, I think there will always be a role for people with standalone social media expertise — it’ll just be a lot more focused role, like an efficiency expert or industrial hygienist. Or a troubleshooter who makes sure that social media tools and techniques are optimized across an organization. And of course, community management will continue to be a particular discipline. But in a lot of areas where there are still big firewalls between social media and traditional functions — I’m thinking primarily of communications (PR & Marketing) and customer support — there just won’t be that distinction anymore.

If Not Now, When?
As for a timeline, my SWAG is that this will happen within 5 years, probably closer to 3. Not to say that there won’t still be holdouts, just as there are places nowadays that still think in terms of “new media” (which, I hate to tell you, ain’t so new anymore) or above-the-line / below-the-line, or any of a number of outmoded categories, but that worm will have turned.

Which means you won’t be able to hang out a shingle that just says “social media consultant” and brag about your Twitter followers, any more than you’d put your typing speed on your resume or boast about your MS Office proficiency nowadays.

Which also means I’d better find something to do.

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts — am I being wildly optimistic on the timeline? Will there always be a standalone social media coordination role (to keep that “holistic” view of social media)? Please leave a comment.

…in a good way. His post “Backwards Work” stuck with me for a solid day, because he’s absolutely right. You’ve got to know the rules to break them, and you need to know what you want your end result to be before you start swinging for the fences. As Chris said, “know what it is you’re shooting at before you draw back.”

So without rehashing everything Chris wrote (its damned fine blog post on its own so go read it), I want to talk about the one thing that will help secure success…excitement in marketing your own company.

Excitement in your company period. Because, if you aren’t excited about your own business…no one else is going to be!

If you really want a good example of what passion and excitement for your product, brand, service or what it is that got you to start your own business, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better example than Gary Vaynerchuk. When I’m getting frustrated in what it is I do for a living, I go to YouTube and check out his talk from Web 2.0 Expo NY from September 2008 on “Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape,” and I get pumped all over again.

Now calm down, Sparky. I’m not telling you to go out and be Gary, but you can take a few things away from that talk that will help you. Gary’s passion for the things he loves (like wine, personal brand, and the New York Jets) is empowering. He loves what he does, and it pays off in spades? Take a lesson from that, and apply it to your own business. Whether it’s plumbing, coffee, design, legal work, the medical field, or, hell, even turning? paperclips into life size replicas of the entire 1969 winning Super Bowl team. In his talk Gary says, “if you love it you will win,” and that’s something I’ve always believed in.

Whatever it is…you started a business for a reason right? I mean, you didn’t start a business because one day you woke up and said, “I’m really good at (insert your whatever it is you want to do here), but I really don’t care about it…maybe I should go into business for myself doing that.” No. Something inspired you to shuffle off the 9-5 coil and strike out on your own. Now I’m saying this, and I am making the assumption you didn’t have a large bank roll behind you. I’m assuming you stepped out into the cold dark unknown of self employment, looked at the horizon, and smiled like a Cheshire cat. I’m assuming you looked out at whatever it is you wanted to tackle as the boss of a new business and said to yourself, “I can do this… and I want to for the rest of my life.”

You’re going to fail sometimes, but it’s that excitement for whatever it is you’ve decided to get yourself into that pulls you through to the next achievement. If you don’t have that, go back to the 9-5’er, lick your wounds, figure out what went wrong, and let someone else worry about where the monies coming from for a while.

If you’re on the fence about whether you’re excited about what you do or wherther the shine has worn off… pick a side and go there. It’s going to suck at times. It’s going to be exhausting at others. There are going to be days where you look at your loved one, friend, employee, or business partner and think, “What the hell did I get myself into?” The answer to that question is the very same thing: “I love what I do for a living!”

Chris Brogan wrote in his post: “Someone had to hunt the first mammoth. Oh, and that poor bastard died a bloody death.”

Bring me that mammoth and my rock. I’m ready to go down swinging. I’m willing to put in the hours, the time, and the effort to move forward regardless of the obstacle. I’m ready to get called crazy, loud, determined, passionate, and…a success. I am going to fail, and I look forward to it so I can get back up, dust myself off, and attack whatever knocked me down in a different direction.

I am a Small Business owner, and I’m excited to wake up every day and say that.

In Gary Vaynerchuks’s talk. he says, “if you love it you will win.” That’s something I’ve always believed in and something that, even before hearing Gary say it, has been the key to all of my successes.

Until next time…stay wicked.

* Photo courtesy of istockphoto.com

Now, back in the bad old days, I would have probably started by looking in the Yellow Pages, which, at the time, was an actual paper book printed with business listings. Flipping to the “Roof Repair” section, I’d immediately eliminate anyone from contention if they had a company name like “AAAAA Roofing” — if they had to try that hard to get to the front of the category listing, how good could they possibly be? (Fortunately for SEO types in the modern era, search engine optimization techniques aren’t nearly as blatant.)

Next, after realizing that there were way too many companies listed, each indistinguishable from the other except for the prettiness of their 4-color ad, I’d ask a friend or neighbor for a recommendation. (Which might have been my first step, depending on how well I knew my neighbors.)

Word of mouth and human recommendations were paramount, but they were also a lot harder to dig up, and really dependent on geography and your personal social network.

If I couldn’t get any local recommendations, I was pretty much stuck with keeping an eye out for people in the neighborhood getting work done, and noting the sign on the lawn or the truck in the yard and asking for their opinion. Otherwise, back to the phone book.

(You could also do things like check with the local Better Business Bureau for complaints. But no one actually did that.)

Contrast that with my experience in 2009: My neighborhood listserve (well, it’s more of an e-mail list with a lot of people CC’ed — not exactly a model of Web 2.0 participatory community tools, but it works for smaller groups) recently had sent out a call for contractor recommendations, so I e-mailed the list maintainer to get the names of some roofers, got estimates from a few, and chose one.

(As to the rest of the process, the estimate was an e-mailed Word doc that I signed and e-mailed back, and the invoicing was online, too. So it was basically a paperless transaction. But that’s a side note.)

The neighborhood recommendation information could easily have been on a Web page or wiki, or  something like Yelp or Angie’s List, but the point is that it’s not about the technology — it’s about collecting and making available the judgments and opinions of people who had to make the same decisions I was making. In high-falutin’ terms, it’s knowledge management and building a local knowledgebase.

In addition to storing and making accessible the data, the online social tools also expanded the neighborhood, by widening the base of people who could participate. This includes people geographically close to me, but whom I didn’t know (or didn’t know I knew).

(It’s kind of like that coastline measurement example people use when they talk about fractals — the closer you look, the more you come up with.)

The rest of it, all the small business blocking and tackling, remains the same: Good word of mouth and a sound reputation rules the roost, and is even more important when everyone can express their opinion, and (more importantly) everyone else can find it.

Anyway, the point of all this is that online social review and recommendation tools simply reinforce natural behaviors, and make them better.

Got an anecdote to share about a social recommendation that led you well or astray? Leave a comment.

Event sponsors were Network Solutions and Johns Hopkins University – Montgomery County Campus, with support from marketing blogger Mayra Ruiz. The event was held at the JHU campus in Rockville, Maryland.

Here’s my event recap; there are few holes in my notes, so you can use the power of distributed social media to get a near-complete transcript of the interesting bits by looking for items tagged “#socstardom”, including photos, Twitter posts (don’t miss Mayra’s posts, @marketingmisfit), blog entries and more.

Here are some highlights. First, here’s Frank Warren:

If you’re not familiar, PostSecret started as an art project a few years back. People mail Frank their secrets on postcards, and of the 1,000 he receives weekly, he chooses 20 that he posts every Sunday to the Web site.

PostSecret doesn’t follow the traditional blog model. It’s very minimalist — Frank doesn’t have commenting, archives, or ads on the site — nothing that would distract from the primary content (the secrets).

He acts as a curator for the content that people send him, and he hasn’t tried to guide the community that formed around the secrets, save by crafting the narrative that comes from choosing the 20 weekly cards.

Also, by posting only 20 secrets every Sunday, he enforces an artificial scarcity (by not including archives, he keeps people from gorging themselves on secrets — they can always buy one of the book collections), and he turns his weekly update into appointment programming.

Since the main PostSecret site is all about the secrets, a lot of the other community interaction you’d expect happens on related sites — PostSecretCommunity.com, the Facebook page and MySpace profile, each of which serves a different purpose.

Other observations from Frank:

* He used to see ebbs and flows of secrets, depending on media coverage, but now it’s a constant flow, so perhaps he’s reached media saturation.

* His biggest mistake: Not collecting e-mail addresses from visitors for the first 2 years, so he couldn’t keep them updated on new developments.

* He ends every week’s posting with a question, sees that controversy can be good, and incorporates interesting feedback into the posts to provide an example, as well as an incentive and notoriety for commenters.

Frank’s a tough act to follow (and apparently even worse to precede) but Rohit Bhargava was game:

Rohit is a blogger from a more traditional mold, though he also has a book — Personality Not Included.  Some of his insights:

* When he posts, being useful is more important than anything — he doesn’t try to entertain or provoke thought; he uses a lot of lists

* He always thinks of potential posts in terms of titles (which he spends a lot of time thinking about.)

* One of the first techniques he used to build traffic and attention around his blog was writing posts that he thought influential people would find interesting, and sending them the posts.

* A popular early post was 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization. Instead of trying to become the “SMO guy”, he leveraged that traffic to blog what he really wanted to blog about (marketing stuff in general)

* He entered a presentation contest (winning an honorable mention) to get the attention of Guy Kawasaki, whom he got to write the foreword to his book.

* The main drivers of traffic to his blog early on were accidental and viral; now, they include Google, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. Also, getting a high percentage of traffic from e-mail forwards is great, because it shows people are e-mailing the links to others.

* In order to keep up with new social media platforms and tools, Rohit will sign up to try new things during boring conference calls. This keeps him current, as well as reserving his username. The next tier of tools are things he actually uses, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. And he knew he was getting serious about Twitter when he found himself thinking before posting, “Is this worth a Twitter post?”

* An ideal blog week for him is 3 posts — the first posted by Monday at 1am (to catch international readers), with two more half-written posts that he finishes over the week.

Both talks were lively, as was the Q-and-A period. As I said, you can get a fuller feeling of the questions and content by searching for items tagged with “socstardom” (I’ll do a roundup post of these items later on).

Lastly, in terms of the event title — if you bring in speakers like Rohit and Frank — yes, people will come.

If you’ve got your own event writeup, thoughts on the speakers or photos you’d like to share, please leave a comment below.

The theme of this particular episode, Ruining It for the Rest of Us, was bad apples — people who spoil things for other people. The prologue featured an experiment by Dr. Will Felps, a professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, who wanted to see what would happen to the productivity of a group when faced with a bad apple — in this case, a planted actor who exhibited one of three toxic behaviors: being a big jerk (generally nasty and sarcastic), a slacker (not pulling their own weight), or a depressive pessimist (a negative Nancy, a nattering nabob of negatism).

As it happens, the negative individual — the bad apple — was consistently able to spoil the bunch, causing his groups to be much less productive than the control groups.

Although this makes sense to me (don’t we all know a co-worker from hell who poisoned the workplace well?), apparently, this isn’t supposed to happen — studies on group dynamics seem to think that individuals will be changed by groups, rather than the other way around.

There was one exception to the bad apple spoiling the bunch — in one group, there was a good leader: someone who, just by asking questions and listening to people, was able to counteract the bad apple and keep the group on course.

Now, I don’t want to read too much into this one study (most of which you can see here: “How, When, and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups“), especially because it plays into the conceits of social media and community management types. I think we tend to overestimate the power of leadership and moderation in shaping the culture of a community, and the whole idea of conversation influencing groups just makes us *swoon*.

But it’s a useful data point.

Problematic as they are offline, bad apples can even worse online. Online communities are usually bigger; depending on how the group has formed, you might not have had prior dealings with other members; you lose nonverbal cues; and it’s generally easier to be nasty to someone online — especially when you throw in anonymity.

Plus, if you’ve ever dealt with a bad actor online (a troll or flamer), you know how it’s easy to get drowned out. Online, one person can shout down a group, whereas offline, it’s usually the other way around. For example, a comment thread has passed the point of any usefulness when the people left in the conversation are all arguing with one person. When you see this, you know it’s time to go (mostly because all the normal people have dropped out.)

You do have some advantages dealing with bad apples online –  there are tools to filter and ignore, or even moderate and ban, bad actors. And if it’s a conversation space that you control (nominally), you can at least lay out the guidelines and try to set a good example — even control membership. (Though use too heavy of a hand and that’s a whole ‘nother problem.)

Anyway, if you’ve got your own stories about or strategies for dealing with bad apples in a group, please feel free to share in the comments.

Mike from Helpstream, a CRM-company, commented that companies should go beyond supporting customers on third-party sites, and should have customer service integrated into their own Web sites. (Amazingly, his company offers solutions to do just that.)

I agree with the theory of that, but practically speaking, depending on the business you’re in, the resources you have available, and how far along you are in your social media strategy, I think the logical first step is reaching out to people where they are, instead of trying to get them to come to you. (In a related topic, see “Blog Last“, a recent entry in the Buzz Bin blog.)

It really depends. If you’re, say, a small software developer, people will naturally be looking to you for fixes, patches and help docs, so it absolutely makes sense to try to build a support community on your own site — it’s the nature of the business.

For other businesses (like local businesses that are mainly brick-and-mortar: retailers, restaurants, entertainment venues, etc. — the kinds of businesses you would see in a social review site), this would be putting the cart before the horse. I mean, look at the time you spend on the Web site of any single one of these types of businesses, compared to a social review site that aggregates a bunch of them.

Sometimes, it’s a chicken-and-egg thing: People end up on third-party community sites related to a business, because the business never bothered offering anything of its own. A good example is the owner communities that exist for pretty much every car brand out there. The same thing for cell phone carriers, and other types of companies.

What happens in these communities? All the usual community stuff: People swap tips, tricks, gripes, deals, advice, etc. And since they’re unofficial, they all have a variant of this disclaimer (”The XX user forum is unaffiliated with XX company.”). But what you do often see are self-identified local reps participating in the forums. Or sometimes, an affiliated business (like a local dealer or reseller) will sponsor a forum within the community.

So say you’re Bob’s Transforming Yugo Motors, a local car dealership. Transforming Yugo corporate hasn’t made a community play yet, but there are established Transforming Yugo owner forums out there, some independent, some as part of larger auto fan communities. Do you try to set up community on your own site?

Well, Bob, first, invest some time and participate in the existing communities. And, of course, don’t just jump in with both feet and your mouth yapping — read for a month or two (at least), to get a feel for the place. After that, start participating (making sure you’ve clearly identified who you are) and try to be helpful without trying to sell people stuff. Seek out the local or regional subgroup most relevant to you, and become a resource for those folks. Then, figure out if it makes sense for you to set up community tools on your own site, and how to make sure that they exist in collaboration, not competition, with existing communities and resources.

If you’re participating in someone else’s community site, you give up a measure of control over your message. Which is precisely why people value them, and trust them more than company sites. What you can do in your owned-corporate site is offer canonical information and access to decision-makers — what you do with that is up to you.

Have thoughts on where and how to engage your customers? Leave a comment.

Here’s the video from the story:

It’s pretty cringe-inducing, as you can see the tow-truck operator literally drags the car up onto the flatbed, without the benefit of skates or dollies or anything. (The cinder block gets caught underneath the car, too.)

This, although a pretty good “weird news” story, isn’t what I’m writing about — this is just the setup.

I’d submitted this link to the popular social linksharing/social bookmarking site Fark, and it made the main page. In the resulting discussion thread, besides the predictable outrage from car enthusiasts of all sorts, there were also a couple of indignant comments from towing professionals, who were equally annoyed at being made to look bad because of the actions of an indifferent or incompetent operator.

They pointed out some examples of how to tow wheel-less cars without wrecking them, off of a community forum for people involved in the towing business.

A tow truck operator community. I hadn’t imagined that there would be such a thing (there are several to choose from), but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I shouldn’t have been surprised.

After all, pretty much every business, activity, interest, hobby — anything that has a specialized knowledge, language, or skill set — has the potential to bring together people around it, into a community.

In other words, people who do stuff like talking about the stuff they do. Things that they’ve done. Things they’re going to do. Things that they’d like to do better.

Before the internet, this was the realm of trade magazines, associations, and annual conventions — now, people can get together and share knowledge, experience, and fellowship online, continuously.

And then, once the community has formed around an interest… well, you can’t talk shop all the time. Once they get to know each other (talking about the subject matter), they tend to keep talking and socialize (in watercooler, off-topic, cafe, shoot-the-breeze type areas).

So what’s this all mean for your business? A couple of possibilites:

* See what communities are out there supporting your particular business specialty. It doesn’t matter if it’s doctor, bartender, tow truck driver, marketer, security professional, sound technician, dry cleaner, software engineer… whatever. Chances are there’s a professional forum out there that’s relevant to you, that you can participate in to keep up with industry news, learn new skills, make contacts, and more.

* This is a tougher one, and maybe not doable for everyone: Think about the kinds of communities your customers are participating in, and see what’s out there. Note that the goal definitely isn’t so you can jump in and start to try to talk up your business and sell to them. Do not do this.

It’s more like becoming a participating member of the community and seeing what people, some of whom may be similar to your customers, are talking about, to see if there’s anything that can help your business.

Anyway, that’s what a tow truck drivers forum got me thinking about. If you have any ideas or experiences dealing with niche community forums, please leave a comment below.