I read an interesting article today about Social Networking and Communities. The comments were as interesting as the article itself. It discusses the fallacies of creating a "community" for marketing or brand loyalty. I really found the view that all of these people are out there creating community when in reality no community exists, it is a group of users or customers who have no other interest in common and not real interest in interacting with each other. Communities share interests, goals, passions, issues and they connect with each other, at least that is my take on it. I do belong to a social network that I feel is a community, we all have common goals and we support and help each other. Yes it is all online but the passion we share for the topic joins us into an online community. Is this going to be the same as the community you belong to in your family, school or neighborhood? No, it is a different animal but it is a community none the less.

We belong to communities of towns or neighborhoods, we don't necessarily share a passion or goal. In fact, often we are at odds with our goals but that does not take away from the idea that it is a community. I looked up community in Wikipedia, and what I took from that is that community has a common ties, a neighborhood or town is tied by the location in which they live. This would make a marketing ploy of trying to claim a community of users or customers false. These are people who want a product but they have no ties to one another. But other instances of online social networking would lead to communities, no matter how closely knit. Facebook in fact is a community with a wide variety of communities within it.
The blog was Marketing Conversation New Marketing and Social Media by Abraham Harrison LLC and the particular article was The fallacy of community . It is particularly relevant to educators who jump on a band wagon without always having a clear idea of what they are doing or why they are doing it. Like all groups or communities (yes we are a community, we share ties) we want to be "with it", we want the latest and greatest. But we have to be careful that we don't put the wagon before the horse. Community is already there, we don't necessarily need to create it. But we do need to be careful how we bandy words and ideas around or they become trite and useless.

These are just my thoughts, read the article and let me know what you think.