Biz Networking - Esti Peshin’s Blog

A friend of mine recently pointed me as to an interesting post by Shahar Nechmad regarding on-line social communities.  One of Shahar’s interesting points is that social communities will thrive if they succeed in –

(a)   bringing local communities together; and (b)  maintaining themselves as closed (and unique) communities 

I make a distinction between social communities and business communities.  While I agree with Shahar’s assessment regarding social communities (his comparison with a bar is a sound one), I believe that people join business communities (which I compare to exclusive clubs) for other reasons.

Hence, other factors would determine whether a business community will enjoy long-term success.

IMHO, the main themes that should be incorporated into successful business communities are:  

• The ability to continuously expand one’s personal business network. This is especially relevant to The Hunter and Addicted characters, which I refer to in a previous post on the subject.
  
• The ability to interact with one’s contact regarding wants and haves. Successful communities allow, for example, mechanisms for seeking and offering jobs, introductions, questions and answers, etc. 
  
• A measure of exclusivity. This is similar, though not identical, to Shahar’s second theme. Even global networks, constantly aiming to expand their users-base, can maintain a measure of exclusivity. For example - by allowing closed groups within the business community.  
  
• Finally, successful business communities should be mail-driven. Some users, especially “Hunters” and “Addicted Guys”, would enter their network on a regular basis regardless if updates were “pushed” to them or not. However, I believe that the majority of users would not. Hence, it is important to allow users to receive major updates via their mail…