Anita Campbell, a follower of small business trends, truly understands online community for business, and manifests that by her involvement in it. Her many hats include small business blogger, podcaster, columnist, and Work.com community leader. She just wrote a blog post on Small Biz Trends called Why Online Community is a Hot Topic. She says that online community is more and more important for business for the following reasons:
1. More content competition requires engaging people to get repeat visitors
2. It's risky to rely on search engines alone for traffic
3. Online networking is proven
Anita's Inc. column From Blogs to Online Communities provides more detail.
I definitely agree with Anita, and have many recent examples that "online networking is proven." For example, I was on Twitter and saw that Guy Kawasaki had sent out a tweet asking for a list of small business sites. I happened to have one on hand, and immediately sent it to him, and Guy ended up using many of the sites on my list including Work.com's daily feed on the small business section of his feed aggregator site Alltop.com. We have since seen much traffic from Alltop.com - and it all started with checking Twitter!
At the Online Community Business Forum 2008 in Santa Fe which I recently attended, someone raised the question: “Can you even talk about community these days as a separate thing? Isn’t the web one big community now?”
Tags: ocbf2008, anita campbell, small biz trends, online community, guy kawasaki
Comments