Virtual Community Multiplier Effects

Web Sites, News Groups, Mailing Lists, and all sorts of online interest groups will have virtual communities around them. For almost any commercial activity there will be a host of such communities.

Not Just Interested — Interconnected

Anything you do on your site will be of interest to the members of such communities. Sharing information with them, is not merely a question of passing a message to a certain number of people.

Your Messages and Links Get Reproduced

Such groups only exist to communicate and interact with one another. In doing so, they will reproduce your information (and in-bound links) over and over again on web archives and the like, i.e. multiplying the effects.

Messages Spread From One Group To Another

Having a single community organised around a topic is almost unheard of. They always split, fragment and proliferate — and there are always people who straddle the boundaries between them. These people act as bridges, passing ideas and information back and forth between related communities.

One simple email message to a usenet newsgroup can, therefore, get spread to dozens of different communities comprising tens or even hundreds of thousands of potential customers — carrying with it, not only your information, but also your in-bound links.

Chinese Whispers

Relying on others to spread your message can have unforeseen (and unpleasant) consequences, but the chances of unfortunate distortion can be limited by keeping the initial notice simple and unambiguous.