A little while ago I conducted an interview with good friend and co-owner of Playfire, Ben Phillips.
He shares some interesting insights into setting up and running your own community as well as bringing it to market.

Here are a few snippets of the interview
On using widgets as a marketing tool:
This provided us with a boost in [...]

Through Rethinking Media (a Dutch site) I stumbled upon some excellent advice for community managers from Sanne Walvisch, who is the manager of ‘young women online’ at Sanomo Publishers. The information was first published at Erwin Blom’s blog (again, a Dutch site).
Unfortunately, all these links and the information is in Dutch. On the bright side, [...]

Over at ZDNet Dion Hinchcliffe has written a very good and comprehensive list of important things marketeers should pay attention to when starting a community, or even when they are already running it.
Below is a quick run down of his points, as well as my added thoughts. For the entire article you can visit this [...]

It’s easy to set up an online community. Buy some hosting, pick the tool of your liking and without too much effort you should have set up a ‘community’ in no time.
However, just because you call it a community (or the software vendor does!) doesn’t make it a community. What you have done so far, [...]

Seth Godin made two excellent points in his latest blog enty “What does Santa look like?”

Most people want to believe.
And we’re most comfortable believing what everyone else believes.

I completely agree with him here. I made a similar point, but on a completely unrelated topic. The last 4 years or so I have been an admin [...]

A few years ago blogging was the next big thing. Every company figured they needed one, although barely anyone had a clue why exactly. Whilst blogging has matured as a medium, communities seem to be the new darling of online marketing.
A recent report by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and Society for New Communications Research has shown [...]

Today I read a comment somewhere (I honestly can’t remember where it was) saying in which somebody said Twitter was a waste of time as technologies like it have existed for ages, just in different forms - I believe ICQ was mentioned as an example. It could have been another thing with a few different [...]