What ISN’T a Community?

A post earlier this week by Catherine P. Taylor on MediaPost generated a lot of conversation, some a bit semantic and academic, but some very interesting. The post was a (not very positive) review of MyStarbucksIdea.com, a fairly new site wherein Starbucks customers can submit ideas and have others vote and comment on them. If you’re familiar with Digg, imagine that except every story is about Starbucks.

The key tenant behind Cathy’s criticism I think can be summed up largely in this quote from the article:

My Starbucks Idea doesn’t do much to connect Starbucks loyalists — or even haters — to each other. In fact, somehow, even though it solicits ideas and feedback from consumers, the site feels like it’s much more about Starbucks than the people who go there…. Allowing Starbucks consumers to connect with one another is a missed (or maybe future) opportunity.

This got me thinking about the nature of community, something that is talked a lot about in the social media and marketing spaces. In one of the comments to Cathy’s article, Shel Holtz states that he believes “there’s no need to undertake a discussion on the definitions of these terms. Believe me, that debate is fully joined in plenty of other places.” That said, I’m going to allow myself the conceit of opening up another front in that debate here with my “community”.

Let’s take the MyStarbucksIdea example as a starting place. Can a community exist around one focused goal, such as providing and sharing feedback on a company’s services? Does that make a board of directors, or an annual general meeting, a community too?

I did a little Googling to try and find appropriate definitions of community that go beyond the Oxford basics and found an interesting blog post going back 3 years by Jennifer Rice on the BrandShift blog. Jennifer quotes from Jake McKee at the Community Guy blog and his definition of community.

A group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.

Jennifer goes on to agree mostly with this definition, but adds:

But I’m not sure if I agree with the qualification that it’s about relationships developed over time. For example, I write a blog post that generates discussion: readers make comments on both my post and on other readers’ comments. I’ve formed a community, but it will only last a day… 2 days if we’re lucky.

A tool that I often to use when trying to define something very broad is to determine what it ISN’T. I think this is the information architect in me. It’s often easy to put everything into every bucket, and say that nothing is unimportant, but that’s not usually helpful at the end of the day in figuring out what is in or out of a particular navigation scheme, for example.

It seems that there are three essential elements that would each require some minimal level to achieve a community:

1. Purpose – Do a bunch of people milling about randomly in Dundas Square constitute a community? Probably not. Do a bunch of people gathered in Dundas Square to see a concert or attend a rally constitute a community? Probably. What’s the minimum purpose required?
2. Length of time – Is there a minimum length of engagement required for a community to form? If I’m standing in a shop line-up for 3 minutes and get to chatting about the weather with the people there, are we a community?
3. Depth of relationships – Does community require that the relationships formed have some level of depth? Is it a community if I don’t know your name? Where you are from? That you just zombie bit your cousin’s ex-girlfriend’s old roommate’s boss on Facebook?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – what ISN’T a community?

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