In the early 2000's building communities around your brand, service, or organization was all the rage. Books like Cluetrain Manifesto by Cliff Figallo and Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim provide solid tips and how-to advice on how to "build it so that they would come", and in many cases it worked, causing all the headaches involved in a rapidly growing userbase: bandwidth, moderation, scalability and so on. In most cases, communities built for a particular purpose took on a life of their own and provide little measurable value to the companies that started them. Users actually became "parasites", sucking up bandwidth and other resources with very little monetary return on investment. Many companies have abandoned their community building efforts because of this. Two current models of online community tools do seem to show some promise for organizations and companies interested in using social means of reaching people and building relationships: social recommendation engines like last.fm that help people find new things they are likely to be interested in, and small, well-targeted, niche communities that dont try to be something for everyone. These smaller communities are like neighborhood pubs, with a strong local clientele built of regulars. The larger communities and social software sites are like chain bars, which are very popular for a time, but without a core clientele. Soon the crowds move on to the next one. Online, it was Friendster, then Myspace, and now faceparty that are drawing the crowds. And these arent communities, but services that allow users to create their own communities. Anymore, it doesn't make sense for companies or organizations to build the community themselves, instead they should provide the tools for users to build it for them. The Yahoo model is to create compelling, useful, easy to us tools, get those tools to talk to other tools, build a user base, keep improving or buying new tools. This is a successful strategy, but requires a lot of time and money to keep up to date. A small organization or business doesn't have the resources to keep up with the kind of tools that Yahoo, Google, or myspace develop to keep their userbase engaged. For small organizations, the strategies have to be different, focused on building an audience, and keeping up with it, rather than keeping up with tools. The strategy should be to engage with an audience wherever they already are, to be nimble and move with an audience from platform to platform, and to help them find third party audiences you've allied with. Online communities manifest themselves around blogs, so blogging and engaging with existing blogs achieves this strategy. Building tools is less important than building relationships.