I got a kick out of the title of Barry's online communities post, "Online Communities are Awesome." :) By the way Barry, great post...on an important subject. Online communities aren't just for networking and discussing like-minded topics with friends. In fact, they're one of the most notable trends on the web and an integral part of business development and marketing for any industry. Well heck, just look at the interaction, collaboration, information share and brainstorming that goes on at Active Rain or MySpace.com. Sites like these allow individuals to coalesce around a given topic or interest and as you can see they're very effective. Online communities provide greater potential for interaction and draw attention to any given topic much more effectively than loosely-joined individual blogs or websites. I like the way David Crockett put it, "its much easier to find a "galaxy" of stars than a single one." Being that the search term "real estate blogs" delivers over 80 million results, you can understand his reasoning. Affinity based communities and social networks offer particular advantages for companies looking to create stronger SEO leverage and extend their value and brand by engaging customers, colleagues and constituents within their own branded community. Like Barry mentioned in his post, that's the direction Blogging Systems has been moving for the past year or so and funny enough we got the inspiration for our geographically based, community publisher product from one of customers, David Crockett. The idea was to create an online community using blogs at the local level. Hence, a hyper-local news and information blog branded and hosted by the realtor/broker. The bloggers in this case are local community organizations such as civic groups, schools, etc. The content is all very local in nature so that it resonates with the residents of your community. Who better to take the offline contacts they've established in their community and bring them online but realtors.....It's a powerful marketing tool and a very dynamic extension of brand. If anyone else has any exciting and innovative ideas they want to share, I'm all for it! :)
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