I am lecturing twice today at Bentley College in Waltham, MA for Professor Mark Frydenberg’s IT101 course: Introduction to Information Technology. Mark is extraordinary in the degree to which he incorporates, teaches and uses web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogging, popfly mashups) in his class.

The morning class was delightful and of course, we live streamed the entire thing on Qik.com/pistachio

I told my Twitter followers to follow this link to remain abreast of the students’ conversations and remarks via Twitter during the class. It is just a www.tweetscan.com search for “pistachio” so that everyone can follow all of the replies together and see the students’ individual introductions. It kept us all on the same page. Fun.

Next class is in a few minutes, I’ll return later to embed the video… Follow us live (if chat doesn’t work, there is probably just a time lag on the upload) at www.Qik.com/pistachio.

Community, duh, equals people with things in Common. Those things in common are what Hugh McLeod at Gapingvoid has been calling social objects.

Apple’s lack of “social media” efforts have been widely criticized, BUT. Who has arguably the strongest cult, err, community following of any technology company going? Oh yeah. Right.

They did it by creating things people feel so passionate about that the community arose on its own.

If your company is smart enough to value community, what can you learn from this?

Community sin #1 Community without love. iPod is a social object because people have a passionate relationship to it. How does your company stir passion?

OK, stop laughing. Your work matters to someone. There’s a headache you solve or you wouldn’t make money. Take waste management. Passionless. Yawn. Except, someone SURE cares when there’s the lack of it. And the person whose job it is to take care of personal and commercial trash disposal sure as hell cares when the service sucks.

Community sin #2 Trying too hard. I won’t even bother to google for examples, surely you’ll have plenty in the comments. Picture yourself standing in the middle of the playground at recess yelling “hey guys! let’s make an M&M Mars community!” FAIL. Instead, try “hey guys! who wants some M&M’s?”

Communiy sin #3 Community as destination (and to benefit the company only) instead of as means to something mutually interesting. Be useful. Be convenient. People have enough obligations in the circles they currently frequent. Don’t build another damned place for them to go. Build stuff that fits and goes wherever they already are.

The bottom line is that someone already cares or you wouldn’t be in business. That’s your community. Serve them well.

What are your “Community Building” pet peeves? How would you guide a company trying to generate real business value through community?

Amazon Gets Into MMO-Powered Crowdsourcing - GigaOM

I found this really interesting. Amazon, whose tools for surfacing, associating and recommending content (products) fascinate me, is pulling in incentives from the MMOG world to encourage its “experts” community to assist other shoppers.

To me Amazon is way ahead of other players in establishing and developing the kind of socially-mediated marketplace that I envision for the future.

Wagner James Au explains:

With Askville, users who provide helpful answers are given virtual gold as they rise in status (called “levels”) — two metrics familiar to anyone who’s ever played massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Questville will take this to its logical conclusion, offering adventures and Quest Coins to helpful Askville users. With a game like WoW, you become more powerful by killing monsters and completing fantastic tasks; with Questville, you’ll get virtual rewards for providing helpful real-world information.

Think about it: how can businesses of the future encourage their communities to “invest all that time, ability and creativity” that goes into gaming into helping people source and buy the things that they truly want and need.

PS: Alice Taylor of Gaming blog Wonderland got the hat tip and had this delightful quote: “We humans are such reward-oriented critters, aren’t we!”

(Via I am so sorry but I forget who tweeted the link .)