Rating: 
Summary: Building Community? Save thousands of $ and read this book!
Review: "Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities" raises the bar in the online communities field.I've been in the Virtual Communities business for almost 25 years. During those years, everyone pretty much had to build their online communities by the seat of their pants. We were usually cursed to commit the same mistakes that so many others had encountered along the way. Many times communities would seem to run well for months, and then they would become popular, and then fail! Other times, otherwise interesting communities would languish for lack of a clear "Mission Statement" or poorly managed Terms of Service. In short, there was very little benefiting from other people's successes and failures. This book changes all of that, forever! (Thank goodness!) Amy Jo Kim brings together all of the fundamental building blocks needed to create a solid foundation for a successful web-based community. She provides the intellectual planning tools you need to help you understand what your community is about, how it will function, and how to help it grow. If you don't understand online communities, this is THE book that will help you "get it." Save yourself the first $3,000 of Community Web Site consulting, buy this book instead and use it! This book instantly became required reading at my company, Communities.com. It immediately started saving us staff training time! F. Randall Farmer Cofounder, Communities.com
Rating:
Summary: Building Community? Save thousands of $ and read this book!
Review: "Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities" raises the bar in the online communities field. I've been in the Virtual Communities business for almost 25 years. During those years, everyone pretty much had to build their online communities by the seat of their pants. We were usually cursed to commit the same mistakes that so many others had encountered along the way. Many times communities would seem to run well for months, and then they would become popular, and then fail! Other times, otherwise interesting communities would languish for lack of a clear "Mission Statement" or poorly managed Terms of Service. In short, there was very little benefiting from other people's successes and failures. This book changes all of that, forever! (Thank goodness!) Amy Jo Kim brings together all of the fundamental building blocks needed to create a solid foundation for a successful web-based community. She provides the intellectual planning tools you need to help you understand what your community is about, how it will function, and how to help it grow. If you don't understand online communities, this is THE book that will help you "get it." Save yourself the first $3,000 of Community Web Site consulting, buy this book instead and use it! This book instantly became required reading at my company, Communities.com. It immediately started saving us staff training time! F. Randall Farmer Cofounder, Communities.com
Rating:
Summary: Must Read for every Website Planner / Manager
Review: A friend of mine very kindly gifted "Community Building on the Web" by Amy Jo Kim to me since I am in the process of seting up a social portal in India. I shall be forever grateful to Ms.Kim not to mention my friend for having saved Me from Myself! We have all heard how Content is King! but Ms. Kim brings out clearly the integral component of any website - social or commercial is Community. Without visitors coming back to see your content, it remains useless and there are enough of high profile portals with huge content and few eyeballs! Moreover, Thanks to the numerous content providers, Website Content can be duplicated within a reasonable timeframe and if flushed with funds (?) then within an even more shorter time period. However what cannot be duplicated and hence is truly an Entry Barrier is an Existing Community around a particular website. Ms.Kim presents a well written, structured and comprehensive guide to online community building. Her simple-to-follow design principles are excellently presented and reinforce the fact that the Internet is an extension of the real world with the twin technology-based benefits of interactivity and reach. Social dynamics do not change online, strategies and tatics do! I have found the examples and references invaluable for understanding the enviable success-stories and inexplicable failures. Finally Message boards and Chat-rooms have been designed as a feature (Coz every site has it!) by many an experienced and so called knowledgeable web solution company. However "Community buiding on the Web" clearly brings out the fact that these need to be incorporated seamlessly into websites and used as community-building tools for longterm benefits and sticky eyeballs. Once again, Thank You Ms.Kim, I might have gone chasing Content spending needless time, effort and hard-to-come-by-these-days money!
Rating:
Summary: Must Read for every Website Planner / Manager
Review: A friend of mine very kindly gifted "Community Building on the Web" by Amy Jo Kim to me since I am in the process of seting up a social portal in India. I shall be forever grateful to Ms.Kim not to mention my friend for having saved Me from Myself! We have all heard how Content is King! but Ms. Kim brings out clearly the integral component of any website - social or commercial is Community. Without visitors coming back to see your content, it remains useless and there are enough of high profile portals with huge content and few eyeballs! Moreover, Thanks to the numerous content providers, Website Content can be duplicated within a reasonable timeframe and if flushed with funds (?) then within an even more shorter time period. However what cannot be duplicated and hence is truly an Entry Barrier is an Existing Community around a particular website. Ms.Kim presents a well written, structured and comprehensive guide to online community building. Her simple-to-follow design principles are excellently presented and reinforce the fact that the Internet is an extension of the real world with the twin technology-based benefits of interactivity and reach. Social dynamics do not change online, strategies and tatics do! I have found the examples and references invaluable for understanding the enviable success-stories and inexplicable failures. Finally Message boards and Chat-rooms have been designed as a feature (Coz every site has it!) by many an experienced and so called knowledgeable web solution company. However "Community buiding on the Web" clearly brings out the fact that these need to be incorporated seamlessly into websites and used as community-building tools for longterm benefits and sticky eyeballs. Once again, Thank You Ms.Kim, I might have gone chasing Content spending needless time, effort and hard-to-come-by-these-days money!
Rating:
Summary: Superb Sociological Insights into On-Line Communities!
Review: Although this book is designed for those who create on-line communities, it will be equally useful to those who are thinking of establishing a community, those who would like to improve the one they have, and those who are looking for valuable communities to join. That's a lot from one book! As the author says, "This book is a strategic handbook for community builders." It espouses 9 design strategies: (1) Define and articulate your PURPOSE (2) Build flexible, extensible gathering PLACES (3) Create meaningful and evolving member PROFILES (4) Design for a range of ROLES (5) Develop a strong LEADERSHIP program (6) Encourage appropriate ETIQUETTE (7) Promotic cyclic EVENTS (8) Integrate the RITUALS of community life (9) Facilitate member-run SUBGROUPS The book also proposes 3 design principles: (1) Design for growth and change (2) Create and maintain feedback loops (3) Empower your members over time Each of the design strategies has its own chapter. There is also a good structure to propose questions to answer. In addition, you also will find excellent examples of existing Web sites, some of which will be new to you. Not only are the sites discussed, but they are also illustrated with many actual Web pages. I have missed that in many other books about the Internet. This one provides and makes superb use of its visual examples! I thought that the best practice examples worked, because each one was better than any other feature that I have seen at another Web site. Also, the author provides a Web site so that you can keep up-to-date with her latest insights and to share information. But to me the best part of the book were the many astute, rich comparisons of on-line communities to real world communities. Ms. Kim has obviously done a great job of thinking through important fundamental questions about what is possible on-line. Her thinking is obviously in flux. It seems to be pointing to a world where on-line and off-line will have few distinctions, as we relate to many of the same people in both modes. I liked her comparison of how we think about telephone calls compared to other communications methods. After you have read this book, I suggest you also reexamine your business model in terms of how it could be improved by merging with your customers in the kind of rich off-line and on-line communities that are described in this excellent book. These communities can be powerful irresistible forces to power your growth forward. May you find the on-line community that expands your life in many useful ways!
Rating:
Summary: Applies across the board with good, practical advice
Review: Amy Jo Kim has collected many online community learnings and turned them into a practical, readable, and useful book. She has distilled things down to a level where they make sense for the smallest online community, as well as for the mega-commercial sites.
So what's to like about this book? It is well-organized. Kim has built the book around her nine down-to-earth community design strategies with specific elements on how to execute those strategies. She stays on track. It uses examples from both large and small sites which take this book from the realm of theory to one of practicality. You can read all of it or one section and it makes sense. Chapter divisions and subheads make for a pleasant browse for inspiration or to get a specific tidbit. Graphics are used generously, but my "old" eyes had to strain a bit on the screen shots. From a content perspective, I found myself repeatedly nodding my head in agreement with her assessments and suggestions. She pays attention to what I feel are the three main domains of a successful online interaction space: purpose, design, and social structures or interactions. While the business models of online community may not yet be clear, the mechanisms are becoming more visible. You can save a lot of wasted time and effort by using the guidelines, pulling what is relevant, and leaving the rest for when your needs grow or change. Good book. Worth the price! Nancy White
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Summary: Adds a Human Touch to Online Marketing Strategies!
Review: Amy jo Kim has written Community Building on the Web to provide a broader perspective of the concept of community as it applies to the online world. The Internet comprises of millions of people with varying interests and needs to be met. They tend to group around one another at their favorite Websites, newsgroups, and chatrooms. They have, in effect, established their own little online communities according to the dictates of their own interests. We have already seen a number of major online enterprises start to cater to their own members in special ways by structuring their own communities. Amazon, AOL, eBay, iVillage, Yahoo, and numerous My-dotcoms are examples of sites that have nurtured community environments for the benefit of their members. Amy jo Kim offers her readers the background information they need to successfully establish, operate, and manage their own online community presences with relative ease. Readers are taught how to create or re-structure their existing Websites to meet the perceived community needs of their targeted audiences to achieve planned marketing objectives. Amy jo Kim offers some outstanding examples of existing Websites that serve the interests of specific audiences. She demonstrates throughout her book how easy it is to set up individual communities by developing themes, raising topics, offering products and services, encouraging participation and social interaction, offering feedback channels, and integrating sound marketing principles. Community Building on the Web will help readers add a human touch to their online marketing strategies that will help draw new visitors to their sites, to foster community environments, to inspire trust and confidence, and to achieve intended objectives. This book will help Web developers, businesses, and private organizations meet the needs of their own online communities. Start your own today!
Rating: 
Summary: From Mindjack
Review: Amy Jo Kim's long-awaited book, Community Building on the Webarrived on my desk recently. I build online communities, so I'malways drinking in any information that comes down the pipe. The onebig plus that is apparent in the initial few pages of the book, is that this is a good starting point for those with no prior community-building experience. It's not that the book doesn't deliver much richer information -it does. What Amy Jo's book doesn't take for granted, is that there is a large audience out there of people who want and really need to start from square one. Even before the book actually starts, the roman-numeraled introduction delivers Nine Design Strategies. #1 is Define and Articulate Your Purpose. Bang, that's enough to slow some people in their tracks and make them actually think about what they want to do. Three Underlying Principles are then introduced. For anyone actually involved in community building, just the information given in the introduction is more than worth the price of the book. Chapter 1 draws on and expands the information presented in the introduction. Amy Jo even uses Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, presenting concepts to make sure the community member's basic needs are met before offering "higher-level" features. Something which is surprisingly often overlooked. What I like about this book, is that it's void of academic and sociological, highbrow rhetoric. I thought it was quite subtle and interesting that Amy Jo's Ph.D. title is not displayed on the book. Instead, it delivers page after page of nuts n' bolts information on how to actually design, build and manage web communities. And before the building even starts, a lot of thinking has to take place. This book will get the motors running. If the reader's desire is still there after working through the "pull-no-punches" first chapter, then there's good reason to explore community building further. On the other hand, if the reader finds the wind knocked out of their sails, they'd have Amy Jo to thank for that too. No sense in investing a lot of time and energy if it turns out that a community venture idea never even makes it out of the gate. One thing the author really has going for her, with her ten years of community-building experience, is that she's worked in a lot of virtual environments -and that is clearly reflected in the contents. From MUD's, to The Palace to eBay, each environment has it's own set of positives and negatives, and those are all well-covered. The meat of the book delivers a well-rounded arsenal on community leadership, membership roles and rites of passage, etiquette, community growth stages, and even Event Planning 101. The one aspect that might be missed by some is more actual case-history examples. In some ways, I actually found this refreshing, because there are more than enough web-community books on the market that cover those bases. If anyone is actually thinking of getting involved in building communities, they'll soon find themselves reading Cliff Figallo's Hosting Web Communities, and of course, the classic The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold. (A second addition of Rheingold's book will be released soon by MIT Press.) There are certainly more web community books [see our recommended links included with this article], but if there is one book to pick up first, Community Building on the Web, by Amy Jo Kim, is the one. END
Rating: 
Summary: Great depth on an important site task
Review: Back in 1996 and 1997, the notion of Internet "communities" fuelled the dreams of entrepreneurs. These communities let groups of people come together on-line to share common interests and needs - on Web discussion boards, in email lists, in chat rooms and many other virtual spaces. Books like John Hagel & Arthur Armstrong's "Net Gain" (look it up in the Amazon search box) touted the marketing riches awaiting those who could inject commercial aims into such communities. Firms like iVillage built clutches of "community" sites in an effort to cash in on the riches. GeoCities, Blue Mountain Arts and even AOL found they could inflate already bloated valuations by flaunting their "community" credentials. Then came the March-April dot-com bust - and the commercial Web community boom was over before it had really begun. As 2000 went on, site after site admitted that whatever "community" they had, it hadn't created much cash. Lousy timing for Amy Jo Kim, a student of the art of building true Web communities who in April 2000 published "Community Building on the Web". Kim started working with virtual communities back before the boom or the bust, back before virtual communities were even sexy. Holder of a Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience, she's worked at software giant Sun and movie giant Paramount, and her consulting work has taken her to AOL, Origin (the frirm behind Ultima Online) and eBay. She lectures on the design of online communities at Stanford. She knows her stuff. Now she's laid it out in a 352-page recipe for managing the human issues of a virtual community. To Kim, online communities grow like ecosystems, or at least gardens. The successful community-builder, Kim argues, must do three things: * design for unpredictable growth and change
* to manage that change, make sure to listen to feedback on the community's wants and needs, and respond
* as the community grows, let members play an ever-larger role in building and maintaining the community culture Kim calls these three points - design for growth, create feedback loops, cede power to members - her three underlying principles. Hagel & Armstrong argued for the same organic management style in Net Gain. But Kim spells out in exhaustive detail just how it should be done, without making unsupportable claims about its business value. This book targets a limited audience. Doubtless as a result of her work with huge clients, Kim focuses on the issues of very complex, expensive, high-traffic community sites. Readers trying to jump-start a small site will profit from seeing how the big US players do it, but you may also feel overwhelmed. The relentless prose doesn't suit light reading; you could call this volume "749 policies for managing community members". But the narrowness of the work is also its strength. Kim doesn't provide big-picture strategic advice. She doesn't offer hints on technology deployment or usability. She has nothing to say on taking your community-based web site to an IPO, or even measuring a community's commercial success. Her focus remains at all times on the social aspects of community development. And despite the intentional absence of big-picture thinking, "Community Building on the Web" does suggest something of the Web medium's evolving nature. It suggests, indeed, that most online communities will continue to be finely-balanced mixes of corporate and individual goals, often labor-intensive, built on a mixture of paid and volunteer effort, only partially responsive to their creators' control. Hagel & Armstrong believed this back in 1997, but they also believed that community would bring commercial triumph. Thus, they believed, the online community would become in large part a business activity. In the more sober environment of 2001, it seems more likely that most online communities will continue to be nurtured by enthusiasts rather than corporate staff. Community specialists in either type of organisation will gain much from Kim's work.
Rating:
Summary: Really useful
Review: Every online marketing developer has to read it. Really good examples with a backbone of knowledges. Communities are more and more important in the new web economy, the creation of niches are such necessary to fight in a global world that needs to satisfy all these unattended people. This book introduce you in the way to succedd in the creation of the perfect communities. The lack of personalization in many businesses is being substituted by the new customization and retention of your personal and own customers, the necessary improvement of the MGM (member get member) strategies are some of the ways to arrive to the perfect community on line.
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