The internet, and therefore the blogosphere, is based on online communities, each one “fluctuating” around a common interest of its members. They have their roots in the late eighties, in the age of bulletin board systems and proprietary networks (in my opinion, AppleLink and CompuServe were the best examples). I’ve “met” online communities in 1987, while working as a consultant for Apple, and since then I’ve always been a member of one or more of them.

As a PR professional, I always had a clear perception of the potential of online communities for public relations, once the medium and the supporting technologies would have been mature enough to allow the access by a large number of people. I followed the evolution of newsgroups, and especially the Macintosh one (I’ll never thank enough the members of the newsgroup it.comp.macintosh for the lessons they’ve taught me). As I’ve already written in the past, the Macintosh community has offered to PR professionals the possibility of understanding the mechanisms of online communities ten years in advance.

Once I decided that I had enough of lurking and I could have a role in the discussion (at the time, I was representing Macromedia in Italy), I entered the it.comp.macintosh and it.comp.appl.macromedia in order to support the company I was consulting for. As everybody can see from this search, I had my ups and downs (unfortunately, for the English readers, all discussions are in Italian and use a lot of jargon). At the end, the effort was incredibly positive: I started in 1996 with 40 “informal” members, and I handled the community to Macromedia in 1999, with 26.000 members.

I also tried to study the US experiences about online communities. I bough the books written by John Hagel III and Arthur C. Armstrong in 1987, Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities, and by Cliff Figallo in 1998, Hosting Web Communities: Building Relationships, Increasing Customer Loyalty, and Maintaining A Competitive Edge. The latter was definitely enlightening, as it reported the experience of The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), probably the oldest online community, born in 1985. If you want to get a grasp of the concept, you can read this article written by Chris in 1993 (especially the paragraph about Community).

This is the first paragraph: In a medium where text is the only means of communication, trust becomes one of the most difficult but essential things to build and maintain. With no audible or visual clues to go by, the bandwidth for interpersonal communication is quite thin. There are, though, ways in which trust can be built even through the small aperture of telecommunicated text.

Since then, molta acqua è passata sotto i ponti (this is an Italian saying, whose meaning is “a lot of water has gone under the bridges”), and online communities have changed a lot. The last evolution was based on blogs and wikis, which have allowed a large number of people - including the “technology shy” - to enter the discussion. The basics, though, are always the same, those that I have learnt the hard way during the first stage of my participation in online communities.

Today, I’m working as a volunteer for Progetto Linguistico Italiano (Italian Native Language Project) OpenOffice.org. This gives me precious insights into the next wave of online communities, those based on concepts like open source and knowledge sharing. I handle media relations and marketing communications, and - apart from having raised the profile of OpenOffice.org in Italy - I have learned a lot about the foundation of these groups of interest and the use of goodwill for public relations purposes (the story is a typical “David against Goliath” one, where Microsoft Office has a marketing budget of several million Euro and OpenOffice.org hasn’t any marketing budget).

I think that PR professionals should use a percentage of their time to understand the evolution of the stakeholders of their actual and potential clients (you always have clients, even inside companies). As I consult mostly to TMT companies, I’ve always felt the obligation to provide my clients not only the basics of the profession but also an insight into new PR territories, strategies and methodologies, which could strengthen their competitive advantage in the market.

I would have expected a similar approach by the Edelman social media specialists that have handled the Microsoft Vista project. Unfortunately, what they’ve done shows a limited understanding of the behaviour of online communities, especially when there are Macintosh or Linux users involved. The posts of Scott Beale at Laughing Squid are a perfect example of what can happen when you approach someone that has already made a clear choice about Microsoft products, and is pissed off by the Microsoft initiative to the point to auction the laptop and give the proceedings to an essentially anti-Microsoft organization. I will come back on this subject.

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