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June 15, 2006

Third Thursday -- Taking the Community Conversation Offline

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Posted by Giovanni Rodriguez

Why community? That's the topic at tonight's edition of Third Thursday, a monthly Silicon Valley meet-up for PR and marketing professionals. We're interviewing folks from SAP Labs, Linden Lab (Second Life) and Vyatta for a talk about why businesses are so keen on communities. In short, it's a little thing called "wisdom of crowds" -- the increasingly well-known fact that when you have a freely organizing and sizeable community, all sorts of good things can happen. In business terms, we're talking about things like staff autonomy, business efficiencies, and "open brands." But building a community ain't easy. We'll look at the challenges that businesses face when attempting to build online communities -- political, organizational, budgetary.

There's one other thing we'll look at: online communities may be the place where we're seeing lots of innovation, but offline communities are getting a second look. In fact, we're seeing more and more interest in offline communities, and some of the innovative ideas from the online world are being replicated in the offline world. I think Third Thursday is a good example of this. For more than a year, many people in the PR world have been bumping, meeting and sometimes collaborating in the blogosphere. Then one day, a few of us got together and decided to take the conversation offline. And yes, we're experiencing some of the challenges that all groups face when building a community (political, organizational, and budgetary). But we're already experiencing the benefits from the wisdom of the crowd that has been gathering each third Thursday at Fanny & Alexander in Palo Alto. Hope to see you there.

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