Article : Ten leading platforms for creating online communities

Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you’re on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner.

Learning how to design an effective community is something we’re all going have to get better at in coming years.It’s beginning to be understood that communities aren’t just for socializing but for getting things done.

The open source world has been using vast collaborative online communities to develop complex software products successfully for nigh unto a decade. That communities produce robust results is hardly news to them. So too with other early examples of community like some newsgroups and wikis, particularly Wikipedia. The rise of social networking and fundamentally user-powered Web 2.0 applications as a common daily activity has further helped move online communities into a mainstream business topic this year. Social media — and blogs in particular — are also helping raise awareness of the power and reach of community-based communication and collaboration.

Like many technology advances, network-based communities are taking a while to trickle down to the business trenches in a meaningful way, but it is now clearly getting there.

I covered some compelling examples of online customer communities in my recent best practices post and by all accounts, too many online communities today exhibit worst practices such as lack of sustained community management, a tendency to use communities for “push marketing”, cross wiring business and consumer motivations, and lastly, starting with the technology first. Part of this is that we’re in the early days yet and online communities are a new discipline for most of us, having only recently begun a large-scale move form the edge of the network and more into the center of our daily work.

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Courtesy : Blogs.zdnet.com