The Basics of Online Community and Social Media

Community can take many forms such as communities having a traditional base dating back thousands of years.

An example would be the traditional Greek Community, based on Oikos and family values.

In recent years we have seen the development of a new kind of community, namely the Online Community or the Virtual Community as well as Social Media Community.

Basics of Online Community and Social Media

For the benefit of creating a foundation and context at ShoalHarbor, our first posts are foundation oriented. The experienced may find them boring in fact. We need to define Online Community, and get to the basics. In this manner we create our SEO foundation, but that's an online community story for another time.

An online community could be defined as a community that generally exists online, meaning existing and having a sense of real community albeit on web structured sites on the internet.

These online communities generally have a vision, some direction, a set of rules, and possibly an online community membership ritual, as well as software function.

Such online community may have features and function enabled that allow its members or readers to participate by posting content and engagement. A Bulletin Board would be an example of this.

These online communities could be open or closed. An open community is one where anyone can take part and post content.

A closed community could have stricter rules, and the webmaster may have to approve the prospective community member prior to the member being allowed full community participation.

An online community example of this would be at Independent Fashion Bloggers, where members are lightly vetted prior to approval to take part in their online fashion community.

Online communities can be dissected even further.

An online community could exist as a supplemental form of friendship or communication between people or families that already have some form of friendship in real life. Families on Facebook would be a good example of this form of online community.

On the other hand a real sense of community can develop and exist between people that have never met in the real world!

These may be known as virtual online community.

Some social networks and communities are freely open, Twitter being a good example of this.

You could even follow Richard Branson and have insight as to what's happening in his dynamic mind! He may not follow you back though. But he could if he wanted to!

Many Twitter affectionados have never met a huge percentage of their followers or the people that they are following. These are powerful online communities, but true friendship remains a challenge in the virtual world.

Online Community sites make use of many software developments in order to facilitate community and communication. These include Blogs, Forums, Commenting, Chat rooms, Text Messaging, as well as Voice and Video enablement to name a few...