Most people are oblivious to communities forming around their product. If you have a great product, you have to find self-appointed evangelists and ask them to help you. If you can't find them, you may not have a great product.

Identify and recruit your thunderlizards

A community needs an identifiable hero and inspiration from within the company. Many employees would like to build a community, but one person needs to prioritise this task. Therefore, hire a person to be a community champion.

Assign one person the task of building a community

Discourse or verbal exchange should be encouraged. Any company that fosters community building should participate in exchanging ideas and opinions. Your website should provide a community forum where customers and employees can engage with one another. This will help you to listen to what they say.

Foster discourse

Your product should be "customisable," "extensible," and "malleable." Consider Adobe Photoshop. Without the company's plug-in architecture, a community might not have developed quickly. But giving them something to chew on means your engineers did not create the perfect product. This will engage and grow the community.

Give people something concrete to chew on

If you create a great product, communities will inevitably form, with or without your help. However, building a community around a mediocre product will be very difficult.

Create something worth building a community around

There are two requirements of an open system. <ol><li>The Software Development Kit (SDK) is documentation and tools to supplement and tweak a product.</li><li>The Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is information on how to access the various functions of a product.</li></ol> A non-tech example is an open system school that enables parents to teach courses and provides a manual for parents on how to teach.

Create an open system

Companies often feel great if their communities continue to say nice things and buy their products, but if the community says anything negative, the company will retract their community efforts. This is not good for a long-term relationship. However, if a company welcomes or celebrates criticism, it will cause stronger bonds to form with its community.

Create something worth building a community around

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