Hello...short intro...blah blah [don't take too long here]

In 1970, a pair of friends working in a Vancouver shoe emporium decided to strike out on their own, creating the legendary John Fluevog line of shoes. It's no mistake that their user-centric approach to design has made them a favorite of hipsters all over the world. After receiving a bunch of letters with fan suggestions for future shoe designs, John said, "Let's open source our design" and explicitly created a contest for shoe lovers and received thousands of entries from around the world, then let other fluevog fans vote for their faves. Sure enough, the top fan picks are now flying off the shelves faster than they can stitch them. John plans to make this a seasonal staple: user generated shoes.

In 2000, a couple of young designers decided to start a website dedicated to people submitting their t-shirt designs, letting the design community vote on them. They would then print the winning entries, sell them at a reasonable price, then pay the winning designer $2,000 in cash. Since then, over 450 winning designs have been printed out of 60,000 submissions. Threadless is the #3 producing printed t-shirt company in the world. Both founders have been quoted as saying, "Threadless isn't us. It belongs to the community. If the community thinks it should die tomorrow, it should."

A husband and wife team set out to design a game neverending, something similar to world of warcraft or second life. One of the features of this game was a media-rich chat client that allowed you to share your photos with fellow gameplayers. Funny thing happened. The early community growing around this game decided that they not only really loved the photo sharing feature, but they kept requesting more and more focus be put into building out this feature. Soon enough, that 'feature' turned into the zeitgeist known as Flickr today. A photo sharing community so rabidly in love with a piece of software that the founders let the community police themselves against unsavoury material and attacks.

What do the three of these companies have in common?

I'll give you a hint. It isn't a big advertising budget. It's a strong community. And having community gives you some major advantages:

1. Longevity. If you are good to your community, the love that they have for you today will be passed down for generations. Kiehl's, a community and quality focused brand skincare line, has been around since 1851 and profitable from day 1.
   
   
2. Self-policing. With growth comes the burden of hiring extra staff just to control spam and malevolant material encroaching on a product...not to mention large teams to handle customer support. But wait. Flickr still has a relatively small team, even after moving over to Yahoo...and customer service is still handled by, roughly, the same people who handled it at a much smaller number. This is because the Flickr community self-polices. Don't screw with that community, either. Flickr attacker, Zooomr, found this out the hard way.
   
   
3. No need for big marketing budgets. Nope. Shift that advertising money into rapid development and schwag for your fans. Throw a party so that your community can mingle with one another in person. Hell. If you do this properly, you probably won't need to. They'll throw their own!
   
   
4. Amazing market research. Wondering what to develop next? With a loud and proud community, there will be no question. Your next version is already mapped out for you.
   
   
5. Speaking of development... Open up your API...make it rich and featureful. Hell, open source the baby. Your community will not only build out the future of your product (let them make money on it, too...either pay them for their ideas, hire them and/or allow them to charge for their work), they will also protect it from evil-doers.
   

Sounds beautiful, don't it? Well, community rarely happens. And it ain't contrived, either. You don't just 'build' community.

You may have heard the terms: crowdsourcing ... and ... customer evangelism

These aren't accurate. These are even a little 'icky'.

This isn't about using people to do your work. This isn't about exploiting people to make you money.

You have to give to get.

When I was at Riya and feeling (sometimes fumbling) my way through the nuances of being a community advocate, I figured out a couple of principles (or guidelines) to building strong community (principles that fit into, what I call today, Pinko Marketing):

1. Stop all outgoing messages. Concentrate on ways to listen better. Open up the channels to incoming. You can't listen if you are yelling.
   
   
2. Be a community evangelist. It's not about 'creating customer evangelists', it's about advocating for your community. This is why it is important to have at least one person in-house that is focused on listening to the community. Even better is if everyone in-house is doing this. When developers and CEOs get busy, it is increasingly more important to listen to the community advocate.
   
   
3. Drop the crap. Don't think you are being clever in 'fooling' anyone to do your bidding. This is where 'crowdsourcing' really irks me. Anything less than 100% authenticity and ethics will be sniffed out. Trust is your greatest currency. You spend it and it is gone. It is a non-renewable resource.
   
   
4. Think small. Think niche. Forget the 'we're something for everyone' thing. Nobody is something for everyone. Even those who have grown to be something for a large number of people didn't start at mass level. [how to pick your niche: go through points on post 'Target Practice']
   
   
5. Employ open source principles like transparency, open sourcing your tools and getting your community involved in the actual development of your product early on.
   

The value in creating a strong community is clear and the steps are pretty simple. Now, I'd like to open up the floor to getting your thoughts, feedback and stories...

[mind you...I followed these pretty loosely...]