Get the Book!

Open Community

A little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web

Available November 1, 2010

Written for the complicated and quirky world of associations and membership organizations, Open Community is our brand-spankin’ new book about how associations can—and why they should—build community online. (Not to be confused with building a successful private social network. That’s just one small part of a really big picture.)

The book is a collection of big ideas. The simple yet far-reaching concepts, framed by our own definition of Open Community, describe how to approach the inevitably long and complex process of building community online in such a way as to help your association succeed. The concepts in Open Community are actionable and applicable to any association, large or small.

The book itself is organized around five overarching ideas, one per chapter.

Chapter 1: Open Community means collaborating with purpose.
The first chapter gives you a simple framework for figuring out how to define your Open Community strategy by starting with listening on the social web, identifying your stakeholders’ online behaviors and where they hang out, aligning individual business goals with organizational strategy, and measuring what matters to achieve success.

Chapter 2: Open Community means developing into a social organization.
The next chapter covers specific ideas for building internal organizational capacity to build and nurture Open Community, including how to prepare for the impact of social media on your internal processes, individual behaviors, and organizational culture.

Chapter 3: Open Community means embracing the ecosystem.
The third chapter describes the messy ecosystem of your Open Community: the relationship between the public social sites where your stakeholders are already hanging out and the homebase you want to attract them into, what to do about accidental spokespersons, and the importance of small groups.

Chapter 4: Open Community means empowering the periphery.
The fourth chapter discusses how to think about your people differently, in terms of the engagement lifecycle from newbie to champion, the rise of digital extroverts, the member as citizen, and how to find your champions.

Chapter 5: Open Community means participant-defined engagement.
You’ve built your online villages, you’ve opened the doors, now what? What are your members actually going to do once they get there? In the final chapter, we explain the concept of the social object and why that is crucial to the success of your Open Community. We’ll give you some simple tips for seeding and nurturing your community, too.

Oh, and there might just be some fun stuff in there for you too.

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