The best practice method for content creation is using desktop software. Open Source software like Lyx (text), gimp (graphics), Eclipse (sourcecode editing), pitivit (Video editing) and Audacity (audio) are the prefered choice for creating high quality content. The typical workmode with these programs is, that the authors sits alone on his computer and at the end he has saved a file on the harddrive.
In contrast, community building is working different. It can't be done on the desktop because on a computer there are no other others. It can only be realized in the internet. Most tools for community building have to do with transmitting information over the internet. Typical examples are E-Mails, wiki, discussion groups, blogs, Video plattforms, image hosting and sourcecode repositories.
The question is how to combine state of the content creation with advanced community building. If only the content creation is done perfect, the result will be a book or a video which has no audience. The pdf has become 0 visits over a longer timespan and nobody in the world is interested in the content. A low traffic counter is a typical sign that something is wrong with the community building.
Community building starts with existing content. Before a community can be established, the file on the local harddrive must be there. The .wav file, the .doc document or the .mp4 file has to be generated first. The question is now how to transmit the information into the internet and how to motivate other users to visit the content. The first important step in doing so is to understand, what the purpose of the different tools is. Lyx for example is a great software for creating content but Lyx can't build a community. In contrast, a mediawiki is a great tool for building a community, but it is poor choice for creating content. In theory it is possible to edit a textfile on the fly in the wiki-editor and with online video editors it is possible to create a video. But the result will look not very professional. The better idea is treat content creation as on offline task and community building as an online activity.
Suppose a piece of information was created already. This is equal to produce a file. A file has an extension, for example .txt and a file has a URL in the Internet under which the content is stored. This is the minimal precondition before community building can gets started. Community building tries to inform other users that the content is available. This is done in the simplest case by an automatic search engine who is catalogizing the content. If the .txt is capture in the index and a random stranger types in the same keyword, he will get the information. But the chance that this will happen is small.
The more effective choice is, to build a community with manually inform other users. A beginner will do so by sending the URL of his file to a stranger in the hope that he will take a look at the file. But he won't. Why should a random person be interested in reading a certain kind of content, especially if he doesn't know the other person? The more elegant way is to think community building from a different angle. The question is not how to increase the traffic of the own content, but the problem is how to increase the traffic of the overall community.
Let us assume, the overall community contains of 100 bloggers who have created content about software development. What these 100 bloggers need is feedback. And they ask for a higher authority who have judged about their content in a positive way. The best way in community building is, to give the bloggers what the need. Creating feedback is easy. All what a user has to do is to identify an existing blog and write a content. And providing a higher structure is also easy. Because he can submit the URL to a newspaper which will introduce the blogpost to a larger audience. Here are the simple rules:
rule 1: do not promote your content
rule 2: search for a blogpost and comment it
rule 3: post the URL from this blogpost to an online forum
The interesting fact is, that these steps have to be repeated as often as possible and by as much as people as possible. If all the 100 bloggers in the community are acting to the three simple rules, they will promote each other very well and at the end, their community will contains of thousands of inbetween links and lots of new visitors from outside the community. Perhaps a small calculation will show the principle.
The assumption is, that the blogging community contains of 100 bloggers. Each of them is acting according to the rules and he is doing so 1 times a day. After one month, the bloggers have created 30*100=3000 comments in their own community. And additionally they have submitted 3000 URLs to a newspaper and informed a larger audience that in their community something interesting was happened. What we can say for sure is, that after a single month, the traffic in these blogs will get much higher.
Media experts are calling such behavior viral marketing or grassroot movement. It helps a lot for community building and it increases the visibility of existing information.
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