*This content was previously published on Social Conversations in June 2010.  Social conversations was a product of Serengeti Communications which closed in 2012

This week starts our brand new series of thoughts on social media marketing in the area of Community Building.  Over the next three weeks, we’re going to feature pieces on:

• Building a Community
• Managing a Community
• Rewarding a Community

Keep in mind a community isn’t merely a forum or a message board, a community can be a fan page in Facebook, a tweetchat on Twitter, a photo group in Flick or your subscriber base in YouTube.  A community in social media can be anywhere, on any site and take many forms.

So lets jump right into it with looking at whether you should build your own social media community or just join an existing one.

There’s a lot of agencies and companies out there that sell a slick list of “things we can do for you” without even knowing what it is your company actually does, who your audience is or where they are currently interacting.  They’ve built really cool, whiz-bang tools that create super connected communities that are going to be the next, latest, greatest thing in social media … and you should sign up now!

Hold your horses there partner, you just might be putting that cart before the proverbial horse.

In the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing series, we talked about research in social media as well as human analysis in research.  This is something you definitely have to invest in before you even consider starting your own social media community just because an agency approached you with the idea.  There’s a lot of unanswered questions if you just throw up a “community” and expect people to automatically start participating.

Is There a Need?

You need to dig into your research and see if there is really a need to be filled.  Are people scattered in their conversations, or is there already some sort of established community out there.  Is there some sort of gap the existing communities are missing that you could possibly fill and build your own community with?  The reason you need to identify if there is a need for a new community is because it’s very difficult to get members to move out of a community they’ve already formed relationships with.  They come to trust and become very comfortable with their existing community, it can be a pretty tall task to just start a community and expect the existing one to move over to your platform, just because you built it.

What’s The Right Platform?

Along with your research you’re going to find out just how people are engaging and sharing in social media communities.  Just because there’s this new whiz bang platform some company is touting, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the platform your audience will want to use to communicate, engage and share.  If they are primarily on Twitter, it’s going to be pretty tough to move a community over to a forum more message board type of community.  If they are use to uploading photos and talking in groups, it’d going to be a tall order to move them over to your Facebook page.  Understanding if its the right platform is another key element to success or failure here.

How Will You Build the Community?

One of the other pieces you have to consider about building or joining a community is how will you build the community?  How will you promote it to get new members, how will you bring in the influentials?  What do you have to offer that’s special?  Will you rely on other forms of marketing and communications to drive interest in the community or will you rely solely on the one on one engagement and invitations to become an exclusive member?  What kind of community do you want to grow, one that’s private, one that’s semi-private or one that’s wide open?  How you build the community can be just as important as the need and the platform because it brings a lot of different personalities together to share and engage.

Just keep in mind, just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come to your social media marketing “field of dreams”.