Online Education

Here at CareNetworks, we’re taking part in the virtual book tour that our good friends Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish have launched to explore the concepts in their new book, Open Community: a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web. This post is Lindy’s take on the Open Community concept and why it’s important to you.

Building Community on the Web

We come from the association industry and for many of us “membership” people, community is old hat. It’s what we do. It’s central to our work. And yet, for some reason (actually a lot of reasons) what we know about community isn’t always translating well to building community online. Maddie and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web – from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff and members, to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. It’s easy to get bogged down in the newness and the detail, and miss the bigger picture – not the 10,000-foot bigger picture, but the “just high enough to make practical sense” bigger picture.

What is “Open Community?”

So we started writing the book, and the idea that kept popping up is the concept of “Open Community.” Here’s the gist. Your Open Community is your people who are bonded by what your organization or company represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online.  To be clear, the Open Community concept is not about building an online community platform or internal, private social network. That could be one tactic in your arsenal, but one of the most important first steps toward building community online is accepting that your Open Community is out there, not just on your web site. Your stakeholders are connecting on their own terms in the social spaces where they spend the most time, and you need  to be where they are. Sometimes, rather than hosting every conversation and leading every initiative, your company can (and should) simply be present and act as a supportive participant.

Open Community and You

The concepts we present in Open Community are important for the Senior Living, Long-Term Care and Home Care industries, too, because they get to the heart of why building community on the web can help companies like yours achieve business objectives.  If you follow this blog, you already know why relationship building online is so valuable to companies and you already know that connecting with customers and prospects on the web is a smart business idea. Social sites like Facebook and Twitter are showing rocketing growth in usage among people age 50 and older (your audience) and therefore that social media sites can be a good way to interact with people in the places they are choosing to spend their time.

Engaging Your Open Community

But being able to harness what we call the “messy ecosystem” around your brand or your industry, being able to nurture and care for and engage the open community in which your staff, customers and prospects operate, those are the things that will lead to return on investment. How do you get your Open Community to rally for you – to share your ideas and content, to participate in your events or simply to spread good word-of-mouth about you.  Unless you are able to build real relationships between real people, it cannot be done.

We hope our book will help you develop a good understanding of how to embrace the Open Communities around your companies – to engage them in the right way so that the full power of social media can be unleashed when you need it most.

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To purchase Open Community, click one of the following links:

• Open Community on Amazon
• Open Community on Kindle
• Open Community on SocialFish
• Open Community on Engage365

To learn more about how to put Open Community to work for your company, contact us.