The Lean Community: Simple Tactics for Building Thriving CommunitiesHow to convert audiences into communities.From audience to community to movementWe all have an audience.Some of our audiences are small. Maybe a few friends.Some audiences are large, like having thousands of twitter followers or facebook fans.Some audiences are enormous, like the amount of customers a big consumer brand like CocaCola might have.We all also have communities that we have been a part of.A sports team, a club, family, a company... anywhere that you feel a sense of belonging, a common sense of identity with other members of a group with whom you've built relationships, is a community.Audiences are a group of people listening or interacting with one person or brand.Communities are a group of people interacting, and building relationships with each other.When you're a part of an audience, you're loyal to the center of that audience to the extent that it's creating value, entertaining you etc.When you're part of a community, you aren't just loyal to any one person or brand, you're loyal to the group as a whole. It's your social group. It's your people.So how do you build communities out of an audience?The big mistake a lot of companies make is to just create a forum or conversation platform and just invite everyone in the audience to it. There you go... now talk! Be a community!The problem is the reason that someone might be a member of your audience can be very different from why they might be a member of your community. People join communities for:1. Entertainment2. Sense of belonging3. Support4. Education5. NetworkingYour first goal should be to figure out which of those values is most important to your audience.Then you'll want to figure out what are the best platforms for building that community. They might be:ForumsEventsGroupsEmail groups