Branding David

I have worked for far too many companies that make community sound like any other buzz word. They assume that if they do a few different things that a community will surround their product or service, and that they will be able to “leverage” it to do great business related things.

NO!

Community is not something you can force or even make plans around. Communities aren’t to be leveraged in ways that you should be trying to put on a balance sheet for a return on investment. Communities are built up of people, and while people can sometimes be sheep-like in that they will follow a strong leader, they still deserved to be treated with respect.

Finding shortcuts and ways to artificially create a community around your product or service will only end up failing. True communities build themselves. You can help shape them, support them, and keep them engaged, but you can’t create them from nothing.

You have probably read a million posts that talk about creating communities before stumbling onto this post, and it might be disappointing to hear what I have to say, but as a business, you will be better for it.

How Can I Create a Community Then?

So, you still want to have a community around your product or service? Why do you want a community?

Some of the answers I have seen are that businesses expect users to support each other, or that they will be able to create passionate community members that will do evangelist work for them, but what companies don’t seem to understand is how saturated the life of an average community member now is.

Community leaders are rare and have to truly feel that they are benefiting not only the community, but themselves in some way. What is a community member’s return on investment? If you can calculate what your community members will earn by being part of your community, then you will be thinking along the correct lines to build one.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you can just give tokens of your appreciation in the form of an e-mail thanking them, but make it tangible in some way. If you are a software company, give away copies of your software. Don’t make it a big contest or anything like that. Make it something you do behind the scenes as a show of appreciation.

Doing these types of things without asking for anything from your community will build a relationship beyond one of just business to customer.

My biggest tip though would be to find someone outside of your company that is great at managing communities and hire them. Let them be slightly independent and become the filter between your business and the community that you have created, as it can help create the most important parts of a business related community: sincerity and honesty!

Stop trying to do various tricks, following tips, and be open, honest, transparent and real with the people you want to connect with, and while you might not create the largest community in the world, you will start to build a valuable one.

I have been using Mac OS X as my main operating system for nearly a year and a half, and I have found it to be relatively stable, and able to take the high demand I place on it with a fair bit of grace, where other operating systems crumble, break down, and cry after a few hours of dealing with my twenty instances of their web browser and five to ten tabs in each, but what has always been very annoying to me is that Open Office, a free, open source, office platform has never worked natively on my computer. It runs a piece of software before being able to launch that makes the whole process slow, and creates a variety of other limitations.

I have since switched to NeoOffice, which does run natively, but it has always felt like I was using the little brother. So I am happy to announce that Open Office has been massively rewritten, and other than adding new features, they have finally made the software run natively on the Mac platform.

With Aqua being integrated, Open Office 3.0 for Mac not only feels and behaves like a regular Mac application with all the usual bells and whistles, it also is nicely integrated with OS X’s Accessibility API – which results in much better accessibility support than what is offered by most other Mac applications. The re-written code and a native execution environment deliver noticeable performance and reliability improvements.

From TG Daily

Of course the site hasn’t been able to handle the tidal wave of people wanting to get the new version and has been either slow or down all day so far. There are many people trying to mirror the software everywhere, and in two or three days, I am sure it will be easy to get the latest version of Open Office, a great competitor to Microsoft’s wildly overpriced office suite.

I have always been told to secure my wireless connection, and while I have never enjoyed the idea of locking everything down due to the various issues that pop up with wireless devices, I have worried about the security of my data and what that means for both my personal life and my business.

Locking down your wireless Internet connection has always been relatively easy, but could it soon be a waste of time? A great report that I recently read talked about how graphics cards for computers could be used to crack the highest security connection passwords on wireless Internet connections in one ten thousandth of the time it traditionally takes to do so.

A dedicated person with the right equipment could access your wireless connection in minutes or hours rather than the previous assumption of days or weeks. The barrier for entry is also getting lower with the equipment costing less and less as new releases cycle out nearly every quarter.

David Hobson, managing director of Global Secure Systems has recently said that, “brute force decryption of the WPA and WPA2 systems using parallel processing has been on the theoretical possibilities horizon for some time – and presumably employed by relevant government agencies in extreme situations – but the use of the latest nVidia cards to speedup decryption on a standard PC is extremely worrying.”

If you are not using a VPN for your business based wireless Internet connections, then you might as well consider yourself open to attacks and data mining.

Maybe it is time to go back to using wired connections, or finding ways to strictly limit wireless connections by making them only available inside of buildings, and using only computers with certain MAC addresses among other basic security implementations that go above and beyond just enabling one of the types of encryption.