Community for community's sake

Neil Perkin:

Too many brands attempt to establish communities with no clear purpose to that community, or plan for what they're going to talk about not just over the next few weeks, but long-term. So they soon find that they can only talk about themselves for so long and they start to run out of interesting things to say.

For "brands", you can equally well read "publishers". The days where publishers could afford to throw up communities and see what happened are long gone - and were probably an illusion even when we thought we could. Chasing buzzwords is never a great idea unless you have a clear vision of how it fits into your overall content strategy.

Neil's piece does a nice job of setting out a rule of thumb of how to balance experimental and bread-and-butter content. Well worth a read.