Getting a community to grow and thrive isn’t the no-brainer that some companies think it might be. The edict of “set up a [name your social app here] community and let’s make money with it” sounds silly when phrased that way, but it seems to be the prerogative of executives to expect this to happen. At some point, there may be a science to community building – mix this compound in this petri dish and grow substance “x” – but now it is more an art, knowing the appropriate motivators, indicators, and enticements to have members come, participate, and value your community enough to stay.

One of the aspects of community is community management, and after attending a SXSW panel discussion on the topic, with managers of some of the most successful communities around, I distilled the key points into article for TechCom Manager. If you’ve wondered if you have what it takes to be your corporation’s community manager, you can get an idea of what it’s like – before you get handed the keys to the kingdom and told to make magic happen.

Therein lies the problem. The teasers don’t entice me on television and don’t entice me here. You can tell me to watch Living Vancouver or Hockey Night in Canada till the cows come home, but that’s not going to make me like hockey or appreciate the local entertainment scene. It’s a cheap trick, and by now, we all know how to read the cues.

Compare that with how The Hour uses Twitter. They don’t really implore me to listen to their show. Instead, they tell me about interesting items: “Big news this past weekend – “GhostNet” Chinese Virus Busted by Canadian Hackers – http://tinyurl.com/cax5fk Way to go CDN hax0rs!”. They have established themselves as the bringers of news, the custodians of cool. If I’m inclined to watch, it’s because they proved that they were interesting and drew me in.

Twitter can seem like a no-brainer. It’s like a cocktail party, and cocktail party manners – well, manners at civilized cocktail parties – apply. You can wander through Twitter and eavesdrop on groups of people talking; you choose become part of whichever conversation in which the topics seem interesting. A recent article humorously encapsulates the fourteen personality types you can find at the Twitter party, and you know how you gauge your reaction to each of them. You may find yourself backing away from the person who is way too earnest, or too crude, or who tries to sell you life insurance immediately after you exchange contact information. Those you follow are likely to be those you find have interesting things to say on a consistent basis.

There is no right way to Twitter, because everyone participates for a different reason. The question becomes whether you achieve your goals. If you’re not on the mark, you can ask yourself how you’re coming across to your audience, and how you can change your approach to make yourself more approachable by those you want to follow you.

Having gone on this little Twitter rant, I feel compelled to divulge why I spend time on Twitter, and I had to ask myself that same question, as I am not part of the Twitterati whose goal is to have the most followers ever, or who has an obvious, specific agenda. Aside from “this is part of my business and if I don’t particpate, I can’t understand it”, I concluded that I love being helpful, and Twitter became the forum where I connect with my friends and contacts and (more often, now) strangers, and can pass along information and connect people. In fact, I often pass along information I find on Twitter to my non-Twitter friends and colleagues when I think it might interest them. It’s also the way I get my information. My own network is spread out across the globe, and it’s hard to keep up with them. It’s also hard to keep up with technologies and trends, so by following a number of people who are passionate about technology, it’s easier to keep up with things I may want to know to enrich my personal knowledge. Have I met my personal goal? I think so – when I’ve polled my followers about whethe r I bring value to their day, the answers I get back are a definite yes.

So when The Vancouver Sun‘s Gillian Shaw pointed her Twitter followers to the first blog post of the Obama administration, I went there to get an idea of the tone of what I heard on CBC referred to as the New “New Deal”.

About half-way down, I noticed the following sentence: “The President’s executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government.” Fabulous, of course. Then I started to wonder about how this would happen, the speed of which this information would get published, whether it would be single-sourced from the original source, which other publishing channels the material would be pushed to, and what flavour of XML would be used to accomplish all of this. A few years ago, the Irish government got their staff working in XML, without them even knowing it, in order to get them publishing content faster, more efficiently, and without the potential of degraded accuracy inherent with “cut ‘n paste” methods of multi-channel publishing.

With the new administration appointing its first CTO, no doubt there will be great changes coming about. No doubt content strategies are way down on the list – infrastructure and data security is bound to be way higher priorities – but at some point, this will need to be addressed. I can only hope that whoever gets that gig will be allowed to do the conference circuit to speak about how they made it happen – I mean, wouldn’t you be awfully curious, too?