First, it doesn’t matter how you feel about Sen. Clinton, you have to agree that she has persistence and tenacity. While the majority of pundits wrote Sen. Clinton off months ago, she is blocking, tackling, and clawing her way to the finish line. I would argue that the most important characteristic of a successful entrepreneur is persistence and stamina. And after 18 months in this campaign, she has outlasted quite a few other candidates – and she still wakes up every day acting like a winner.

As we enter 2008, I thought it would make sense to break away from the year-end top-10 lists and shift right into the 2008 Presidential election season. As I was watching the Iowa Caucus shape up, I thought it was interesting to think about applying observations from the Iowa Caucus to being an entrepreneur:

One mistake can derail you for a while, but it’s how you deal with it that will guide your recovery. At the debate in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton was the target of the other Democratic candidates. Many think that it was not her performance during the debate that led to her third place finish in Iowa and slide in the national polls, it was how she handled it afterwards. Instead of using this as an opportunity to attack her opponents from a defensive position, she stayed defensive through the Caucus. This colored her entire Iowa campaign as defensive. For a great strategy on how she could have recovered, see Chris Matthews’ point of view.

There are countless examples of mistakes being made and handled poorly and well in the start-up world. For example, in September 2006 when Facebook automatically added its news feed feature which posted content from facebook applications, such as “The Wall” to everyone in your network’s News Feed, there was an immediate and loud outcry from Facebook users. Facebook responded quickly and listened to its users. More recently, Facebook made another mistake and added its new “Beacon Technology” that analyzes the users’ actions on Facebook and other partner sites and makes these actions public.

As an addendum to a blog I wrote last year, The Fight for Top Performers, I thought that the article from this past Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post, Why AOL Matters, underscores some of the issues facing the Washington DC / Virginia area job market. It turns out that Virginia has the highest concentration of technology sector jobs compared with that of any other state. Nonetheless, it seems harder and harder to higher high-quality technology talent. That’s because the federal government employs most of these high-tech workers, which results in these tech sector jobs paying 99 percent more than the average private sector job.

And as a local entrepreneur starting a technology business in the WashingtonDC / Northern Virginia area, I tend to agree with the Washington Post’s conclusion that these Federal technology jobs are successfully crowding out opportunities for non-government technology resources. With so many low-risk, high-paying opportunities coming out of the Federal technology sector, it often seems that the entrepreneurial spirit of local technology talent has sold out to the highest bidder.

With the Fall marathon season approaching – and being in month 18 of my latest start-up – I am going to spend a few minutes drawing analogies between running a marathon and being a successful entrepreneur. Most people who know me well know that in addition to recently starting my third business, I am running my fifth Marine Corps Marathon this Fall. So as a part of my training, I decided recently to talk to some of my colleagues and friends who have started and ran successful businesses to discuss what they feel is critical preparation for the “entrepreneurial marathon”. Below, I distill the results of these discussions.

Have your reasons: Everybody has their own reasons for running a marathon. Some people run to lose weight and get into shape while others may run to raise money for a charitable cause. Regardless of the reason, to successfully run a marathon, you had better have a good reason for wanting to run a marathon, because if you don’t, getting up at 6 AM every Saturday to run your weekly long run will be impossible. After a long week, it is perfectly natural to want to sleep in, but to successfully complete a marathon, you have to complete your training program, which requires getting up every morning and putting one foot in front of the other – just rather quickly.

The same goes for being a SUCCESSFUL entrepreneur – you have to have your own reasons. Because much of what you will do, similar to waking on Saturdays at 6 AM throughout the summer, will seem very, very unnatural. And if you don’t have some very good reasons for putting yourself through it, it is unlikely that you will make it. Furthermore, from my observations and talking with fellow entrepreneurs, money can’t be the sole driver. The best reasons that I have heard include:

• Empathy for the clients and passion for the business problem you are trying to solve
• Drive to build the careers and skills of the employees that you and the company has chosen to hire
• Focus on the bottom line goal of driving revenue

Plan, plan, plan: It is an overused cliché, but I’ll say it again— nobody plans to fail, they just fail to plan. In running a marathon, you need a training plan. It usually includes daily short runs and one weekend long run. The long runs get progressively longer, up through a few weeks before the marathon. Training to complete something as unnatural as a 26.2 mile run requires significant planning, training, and preparation. Without this training, it is very unlikely that a runner will complete the marathon at all, let alone with a good time.

The same is obviously true for being a entrepreneur and starting a successful business. Just like marathoning, there are plenty of people who set out to complete the race, but very few that end up creating a successful business. In creating a business plan, all entrepreneurs seem to have their own secret at creating a business plan that aids in leading to success. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Commercializing Web 2.0 Technology, there are multiple dimensions that are typically present in a thorough business plan. These include:

· Product (or service) development

· Marketing and sales

· Business and infrastructure

· Consolidated financial projections

Personally, I am of the point of view that the first three elements should be tightly coupled to the consolidated financial projections. The advantage of keeping the entire business plan on a consolidated spreadsheet is that as product development or marketing and sales projections change, the business plan morphs into a consolidated operating budget

In a future blog, I’ll go into more detail regarding my preference on specific details of an operating plan spreadsheet.

Choose the right training partner. Having a supportive training partner, with the same training goals is quite possibly the single most important element of training for a marathon. If you partner’s performance goals are different from your own, then the training process will be quite frustrating. One of you will be waiting for the other and the other will be always fighting to catch up.

In addition, you need to be supportive in helping to motivate each other. No one in their right mind wants to wake up early on a Sunday morning and run 10 miles in the August heat. It really helps when you have a training partner that you enjoy spending time with and you know will help motivate you when your energy level gets low.

Similarly in starting a business, you and your business partner need to be compatible in terms of:

• Complimentary Skills: Fortifying each other’s weaknesses – without creating an atmosphere of animosity.
• Motivation: Starting a successful business is a long difficult process full of setbacks. It is imperative that partners be supportive and are able to mutually motivate each other during the inevitable setbacks.
• Respect: The ability to generate and cultivate new ideas is critical and having mutual respect during this process is imperative. One of the best reasons for a business partner is to help push the envelope on good ideas and make them better. And having respect for each other’s abilities makes this process all the more effective.

Run YOUR race. Finally, in running a marathon, you need to run your own race. At the start of most races, the crowd tends to begin the race at a fast pace then slow down as the crowd thins out. If you get caught up in the crowd in starting a race and run at a pace faster than you trained, you will not have the energy to finish the race. Your race is the one you planned for and trained for.

The same is true in starting a business. It is easy to get caught up in the business fad of the moment and dramatically change your business plan into an unrelated tangent. But the fact of the matter is that you, your partner, and investors planned for a specific business model and for good reason thought that was a good plan at the time. Dramatically changing plans midstream should be undertaken with great caution.

On the other hand, this is not to say that a mid-course correction may not be just what your business needs. The most successful entrepreneurs are those that can think quickly on their feet. But caution should be taken in doing so. This includes:

• Evaluate the impact on all dimensions of your business plan
• Be in full agreement with your business partner
• Recommit yourself to the new direction and continue to execute

I hope this analogy is helpful and I encourage comments and suggestions in continuing to play out the analogy between marathoning and entrepreneurship.

As an entrepreneur building a start-up technology business, it often feel like the path to success feels a lot like the traditional Japanese Keiretsu business model. According to Wikipedia, a Keiretsu is defined as:

A set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. It is a type of business group.

In the United States, the Keiretsu concept did not really take off, likely because most large companies begin by acquiring or formally merging vertically to complete their supply chain, then they begin acquiring or merging with other companies horizontally, to acquire other “verticals”.

In applying this concept to technology startup, there seems to be three types of Keiretsus:

• VCs as Keiretsu Communities
• Informal Keiretsu relationships between entrepreneurial organizations
• Virtual Keiretsu through the integration of Web 2.0 Tools

VCs as Keiretsus

As I began to think recently about some of the types of business relationships that a VC brings to a startup I couldn’t help but compare the ideal VC firm model with that of the traditional Japanese Keiretsu. Smart entrepreneurs prefer that their VC brings more to the table than funding, including management expertise and a business network. VCs should bring business networks and true synergies throughout their entire portfolio of investments. This is very much like a traditional Keiretsu, which also tend to be centered around funding sources, such as banks.

Initially, when a company enters a VCs portfolio, the reason is often because of potential collaboration opportunities within the portfolio. But the frantic pace of a start-up often precludes taking the time that a good collaboration requires. In addition, there are often cultural barriers to collaboration. Startups are often led by strong, who feel that they can achieve their startup’s success through their leadership alone.

Unfortunately, successful collaborations between portfolio companies is more rare than it should be. Typically, the earliest that collaboration is encouraged by VCs is when something is going wrong and the VC goes into damage control mode. At that point, you may see VCs requiring engineering or marketing teams to collaborate amongst companies within their portfolio to bolster resources. But by that point it may be too late.

In evaluating how to best utilize your company’s funders, whether they are angel or VC funders, it definitely makes sense to evaluate and discuss how to cultivate strong Keiretsu-like partnerships. What you will likely find is that people are very amenable toward opening up relationships for collaborating.

In my next Blog, I’ll discuss ways that entrepreneurs collaborate to create their own Keiretsu-like relationships and how use Web 2.0 tools to create a Keiretsu 2.0 model.

As I discussed in my previous few blogs, there is a lot of fuss being made of online community. In a previous blog, I defined online community – at least how I see it – I would like to start a discussion on the business purpose of online community and social networking.

In Mark Cuban’s blog, blogmaverick.com, he came up with a pretty good definition of a business model for online community in the context of video and youtube. And with a little editing, can be generic to all online social networks.

“A video based social network, in order to be sustainable, has to reliably be able to generate revenues from the uploaded video content. It has to be able to market the brilliance of its members and the product of their work to advertisers and sponsors. It has to be able to market its members video content online and offline.”

In addition, Peter Theil and Bambi Francisco have started company, vator.tv. Vator.tv targets “InnoVators” to upload their video “EleVator” pitch to the site. I find it very interesting to view the videos and analyze the trend of the uploads, in terms of business model viability. Theil points out a fundamental question that I mentioned a few months ago in Commercializing Web 2.0 which dramatically impacts the approach to the business model. Theil’s point is that there is a fundamental difference between a technology application versus a stand alone company. I argue that this fundamental difference dramatically impacts the short-term business model in terms of the type of infrastructure in which to invest.

Furthermore, it is my belief that a social networking application is not a social networking business. In Episode 2 of vatornews.com, Theil points out that:

“The basic idea [of social networking sites] is to learn more about their users and tell their users things about other people in their network that are interesting and relevant.…It’s at the core of the business model of these web 2.0 companies.”

Again, I would draw a further distinction between product and viable business. Social networks are not about technology product, they are about connecting users and sharing the users’ knowledge and information. They are essentially media companies for user-generated content. Therefore, in evaluating business plans that purport to be social networks, I find that they are in fact product companies. In fact, I tend to believe that social networking and online community, in-and-of-itself is not a business model – but has the ability to dramatically enhance a business model.

So with that said, what is the business purpose of online community and social networking in enhancing an existing business model? To start, social networking and online community affords businesses the following advantages:

• Build customer loyalty: Connecting users to each other by sharing opinions, knowledge, and experiences deepens brand loyalty. If it’s a product or service brand, then allowing customers to communicate about product experiences adds tremendous value. If it’s a fan-related network, such as sports or entertainment, then providing a space for fan interaction reinforces the positive experience with the franchise.

• Mass Market of One: The more customers visit and communicate, the more information the sponsor of the network has about the customers. Therefore, the more targeted and relevant the advertising and sponsorship can be in serving up related networking and product recommendations.

• Increasing Revenue: Of course, building a business model is all about building a base of revenue, increasing customer loyalty, brand recognition, and relevancy, will ultimately increase revenue. Depending on the approach taken, this connection can be tightly integrated or loosely integrated. Either way, there should be metrics in place to measure the impact of the social impact of networking on the business.

In addition to the business model benefits, there are some fundamental product functionality of social networking that enables these business benefits. These include:

• User ratings and comments: These are relatively commonplace at this point on such Amazon and ebay. This enables users to rate and review product. In addition, you often see a reputation system attached to this to get quantify the percentage of readers who felt that review was helpful.
• User-generated solutions: These are typically knowledge bases that are manifested in a simple message board. It is simply a community where users can post questions about a product and the community answers support-related questions.
• User-created complimentary product: This typically occurs with products that support or require customization, such as uploading custom user-generated ring tones for mobile phones.
• User-uploaded content or editorial: On fan sites for music, movies, or sports, fans thrive on building community, commenting on a performance, or critiquing a game. All of which ultimately builds fan loyalty.

And for all of the above types of online functionality for community, if a company does not support, encourage, and sponsor it, the company will lose out on the opportunity to build brand recognition, customer loyalty, and revenue – simply because customers are conducting these activities already online, and if there is not a sponsored location for community they will build it themselves.

In my last two blogs, I discussed how in developing online community, that strategy and process, AND technology, together are necessary conditions for vibrant, online community—and that none of these alone are sufficient. In particular, I discussed my definition of online community and that it is my opinion that the best online communities transcend the online and offline world. In my next blog, I will discuss how online community impacts entrepreneurial business models.

In this blog, I will continue this discussion of online community, and discuss more about how the process of coalescing community through the setting of community norms and codifying the responsibilities of formal and informal community members helps ensure successful online community.

Common Community Roles

As I have discussed, there are a very wide array of types of online communities. Each community will have its own optimal profile of they type of roles and duties that the membership needs to perform to make it successful. It studying the more successful of these communities, I have come up with a broad list of these roles and their responsibilities. Depending on the mission of the specific online community, communities may want to pick and choose the roles and responsibilities that are most relevant for their organization.

These roles include:

• Sponsorship: Depending on the mission of the community, they may need some sort of top-level organizational recognition for the community to ensure its exposure, support, and strategic importance within an organization. 
• Facilitator: Sponsorship is different from a facilitator. The facilitator is the public-facing moderator, similar to a talk show host. The facilitator is a critical role in that this person implicitly sets editorial direction via their choices of content to discuss and their tone of voice.  
• Content manager: Depending on the community, the content manager can be the same as the facilitator. The content manager is simply an editor of content and keeps the content-related housekeeping in order.  
• Events coordinator: Similar to content manager, in a small community, the events coordinator could be the same as the facilitator. This person is in charge of keeping the events calendar full with relevant online AND offline activities. In addition, this person may moderate the calendar to ensure that the registration information is accurate and complete for the smooth operation of the event.  
• Communications: The communications manager is responsible for compilation of communications, such as online newsletter and news and calendar alerts. This is a critical role since it ensures participation of the overall community.  
• Education and skills development: Depending on the purpose of the community, this can be a critical role. This person is not only responsible for evaluating the content and skills development needs of the community, this person is responsible for aligning the content with the fulfillment pf the education and skills development needs of the community. This is helpful in technical communities of practice.

Now that we have reviewed some of the overall basics of forming online communities, next week, we will discuss how online community integrates with successful entrepreneurial business models.

I saw this video about entrepreneurship the other day and felt it was a very compelling topic. As I have been writing my blog on entrepreneurship over the past few months, I sometimes find it tempting to blur the lines between entrepreneurship and small business. But to be clear on my opinion, I agree with the from the Kauffman Foundation that entrepreneurship is NOT the same thing as small business. In addition, managing an entrepreneurial startup like a small business can have damaging effects that will significantly impact the entrepreneurs’ probability for success. Therefore, I thought that the topic was worth some real estate in this blog.

So to give this topic some attention, I went back to my last few blogs and thought I would quickly analyze the difference between entrepreneurship and small business.

Employees

When hiring employees for an entrepreneurial startup, there is both a unique opportunity and a certain type of person that has a higher likelihood of success. Employees that will succeed in an entrepreneurial environment are very different than those that will succeed within a small or large business.

As I mentioned in my earlier blog on hiring top performers, those employees that will succeed in an entrepreneurial business may have more ambition than experience. It is my experience that within an entrepreneurial environment, employees with enough ambition and energy can compensate for lack of hands-on experience.

To succeed in an entrepreneurial environment, employees need BOTH intelligence and a strong work ethic. A strong work ethic without intelligence can run a business into the ground. And intelligence with out work ethic can land great ideas that aren’t executed upon. 

Finally, employees that will succeed in an entrepreneurial environment have to value long-term reward over short term financial reward. This helps to ensure that it is NOT ABOUT THE MONEY. It is about making a difference with paradigm-shifting strategy, process, and technology.

Funding Partners

A topic that I haven’t touched upon yet in previous blogs is funding partners. For a small business, a bank makes an ideal funding partner. There is a low-risk business case that a bank can understand and the loan can get repaid. There are even lending programs through the SBA for small business start-ups (as is mentioned in the above video).

But if the entrepreneurial start-up is doing their job right, a bank will not “get it”. Entrepreneurs are in the business of fundamentally changing the market. As a result, the business concept that they are pitching will, by definition, not be easily understood by the general business community. This is what makes the risk profile of an entrepreneurial business different from a small business. Therefore, the right funding partner for an entrepreneurial startup is 1) self funding through bootstrapping, 2) angel funding, and 3) early stage venture capital firms.

Commercializing Web 2.0

Now that we are well into the Web 2.0 cycle (and arguable toward its end), the concept of commercializing Web 2.0 is not inherently paradigm shifting. The ability to add comments to a New York Times article is nothing new, adding tags to photos on flickr is no longer revolutionary, nor is posting a video making a fool of yourself on youtube groundbreaking.

Arguably, copycat businesses pitching these types of ideas to a venture capital firm are pitching a small business – not an entrepreneurial business. They are small, single-product, product companies, and me too product companies that are very difficult to monetize. Their best option for monetization is expanding their product lines while selling to vertical markets and/or offering a consumer suite; or selling their business to the big guys, as did flicker and youtube, to yahoo and google. But if the company is a “me too”, it’s a game of musical chairs and it is likely that there are no suitors left.

Nonetheless, there are countless examples of the differences between small and entrepreneurial businesses. In addition, getting them confused during the start-up and management of each has dramatic implications on each model’s probability for success.

In my last blog I discussed how in developing online community, that strategy and process, AND technology, together are necessary conditions for vibrant, online community—and that none of these alone are sufficient. In particular, I discussed my definition of online community and that it is my opinion that the best online communities transcend the online and offline world.

In this blog, I will continue this discussion of online community, and discuss more about how the process of coalescing community through the setting of community norms and codifying the responsibilities of formal and informal community members helps ensure successful online community.

The process of setting community norms.

Similar to offline communities, a critical element of the online community-building process is setting a common set of goals and objectives around a set of community norms. Whether these norms are shared with all community members, is up to the specific community, but I highly recommend that these norms be thought through, by the community leaders and sponsors. Through analyzing online communities for nearly ten years, those communities that have a codified set of community norms are in a position to be the highest performing communities. These norms include: 

• Performance metrics: By setting performance metrics, the community’s leaders ensure that the community is designed and has the tools to meet these goals. These goals should be measurable and actually measured on a regular, periodic basis. In addition, these metrics should support the organizations offline goals and objectives and be explicitly tied and reported with the organization’s offline goals.
• Classification and cataloguing standards: Similar to how in an economy there needs to be a common currency, an online community needs a set of classification and cataloguing standards. For example, in the Amplifier Networks community (AmplifierNetworks.com), we have structured the community around the various user groups AND the functions they may want to perform. These user groups include investors, entrepreneurs, and technology innovators.
• Standard approaches for identifying, recruiting, and bounding community membership: Similar to any organization, it is imperative that there be a membership recruiting strategy. This strategy needs to include viral networking where the community members recruit like minded AND those with counter-opinions. These diverging views will help expand the bounds of knowledge and ensure a good balance of opinion. Depending on the objectives of the community and the target membership base, the community may be a non-moderated open, moderated open, moderated closed, or non-moderated closed. Each of these communities has it’s own time and place based on the topic and community objectives.
• Intra-group communication protocols: Communication protocols can’t be formally set in an online community and are difficult to enforce. Nonetheless, the group members themselves will help in codifying the communication protocols based on the aggregate culture of the individual members. I do recommend that the community sponsor have a set of minimum documented communication protocols. Depending on the subject matter, there may be legal as well as other softer reasons for documenting these protocols.
• Functional requirements for technology: In the founding of any online community, I recommend going through a high-level requirements analysis to see what functionality will help – or complicate – the development of the community. In my last blog, I discussed some common functionality that will help build online community that can be used as a basis for determining the community’s functional requirements.

 On each of the above topics, note that there is an off-line corollary for community norms. Developing these types of community norms is not unique to online community. Those studying group and community formation from a psychological perspective know that these elements are crucial.

My discussion of the above norms just begins to scratch the surface on how to incubate and feed online community. In future blogs, I’ll continue to discuss these elements in more detail and give more specific examples of how these norms are manifested online and offline.

In my next blog, and third on online community, I'll discuss the roles and responsibilities necessary for successful online community.

There is a lot of talk these days about online community and a lot of businesses popping up to serve this market. Tools out there to help online community range from the big guys like groups.yahoo.com and groups.google.com, to newer entrants into the market like meetup.com.

As those that know me know, I have been involved in building online networks of communities since 1998 when I first got involved with General Powell’s nonprofit, America’s Promise. Subsequently, I built PricewaterhouseCoopers’ global practice specializing in helping corporations, nonprofits, and government organizations create and utilize private online networks and online community.

At the time, even thought software packages enabling online community cost a small fortune, it was my position was that the technology problem was not particularly complicated and that organizations should not have to spend a fortune to build online community space for their members, clients, or constituents. But at the same time, the popular tools of the time (and still to this day) like groups.yahoo.com were (are) inadequate and ineffective in serving the needs of online community.

Over the past ten years, community tools have generally gotten better, and the prices have certainly gone down. It may have taken almost ten years for this notion to take hold, but it is exciting to see the proliferation of open source software and businesses springing up to support online community (including my company, iBelong Networks).

But what is still generally missing is incorporating the elements of best practice in online community into online community software. As is my opinion with most online technology, the successful of online communities is more than simply a bunch of cool features.

So to continue the theme of my earlier blogs, I want to emphasize that although the minimum software requirements for online community may not be particularly advanced, like so many things in starting a small business, the success lies in productizing the technology with a stellar implementation process. Below, I will highlight a few of my findings in studying online community strategy, process, and technology for almost ten years.

What is an online community?

An ONLINE community is essentially the same as any OFFLINE community. An online community is a group of people who share a common interest, common practice, and a commitment to share and expand their objective. Their objective may be to further the knowledge base within a certain area, to get a candidate elected, or to share information on an entertainment star.

The biggest difference between an online and offline community is that an online community can be geographically disperse and represent multiple layers, organizations, or communities while still being very active. This activity is typically through a diverse set of online functionality, including:

  Transcending the online and offline worlds.

The most successful online communities transcend the online and offline worlds. These communities have off-line goals, use tools to organize and communicate online, and perform some sort of activity offline. The following is an illustration of this model.

Successful online communities.

In addition, in studying successful online communities, I found that the characteristics for successful online communities is not much difference than offline communities. These include:

• Clear, demonstrated need: In order for a community to really take off, there needs to be a good impetus for the community to coalesce. And it is this need that will keep things going. For example, Youth Service America is a large offline community focused on engaging young people in service and service learning. YSA has identified a global need to engage young people in service and they have successfully used their online community, SERVEnet.org, to manifest their offline community in an online world.
• Existing formal or informal networks: Existing communities have formed where there is an existing need – whether it’s online or offline, formal or informal. By applying additional principles of community to these existing networks, they will have the tools to thrive. 
• Community leadership: Just like offline communities, there needs to be a community leader. This leader can take a formal high-profile role or can take a behind-the-scenes role. Either way, successful online communities need a leader who is passionate about helping to facilitate the achievement of the community’s goal.
• Organizational sponsorship: Although not necessary, most successful online communities tend to have an organizational sponsor. The sponsor’s role may be to provide financial resources, offline mobilization tools, or simply legitimacy. For example, SERVEnet.org is the largest online community of volunteers and nonprofit service professionals. I credit the success of this online community to the sponsorship of its companion offline organization, Youth Service America.  
• Manageable size and scope: The most successful communities tend to have a very specific objective and not want to do and accomplish everything for everyone. This is particularly true in their infancy. But as communities grow, they tend to take on more goals. This tends to work out as long as this growth is organic and is supported by other factors of successful communities.
• Culture amenable to sharing and communicating: This may seem pretty intuitive, but obviously a necessary condition for a successful community is that the culture of the potential community members will need to be amenable to sharing and communicating. There are plenty of instances, where this is the case, as a natural course of business. For example, government agencies have tried to set up knowledge sharing amongst their contractors. Without some sort of contractual obligation, contractors tend not to want to collaborate, lest they reveal business secrets.
• Technical competence and access to necessary technology: As technology tools get easier to use and users are more tech-savvy, this becomes less of an issue. But unfortunately, as functionality of technology expands, good usability often takes a backseat to cool features.  So it’s important to make sure that the software’s usability matches the sophistication of the target user group.

I’ll finish this topic in my next blog when I discuss the process of setting community norms and common community roles. In the meantime, the overall point I want to make is that only a fraction of this blog’s real estate was given to the actual technology behind successful online community. And even though I am a technology entrepreneur developing online community through iBelong Networks, I am the first to admit that having good technology to create and sustain online community is only the necessary condition—but good technology is not nearly sufficient.

In order for online community to be successful, there needs to be an entire strategy and process around mobilizing and maintaining online community – to facilitate achievement in the offline world. Unfortunately, a lot of the technology products created by entrepreneurs that I have seen, have great technology, but no means to support that technology through a community strategy that is integrated into its business model. This may work if the business strategy is to immediately sell to a Yahoo or a Google who can throw a lot of traffic at the technology and pray for community. But a sustainable business relies on fulfilling a consumer or client need and making a commensurate amount of revenue and profit.