[PRL] Building a community for your new language/system/etc.

[Mitchell Wand]

From
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/user_community_.html:

Every time I give a talk, someone always asks, "That's all good and nice
that helping users learn is the key to creating passionate users... but
who's going to do all that extra work? Who's going to make the extra
tutorials and better docs?" Answer: *your user community*. Think about all
the things a strong user community can do for you: tech support, user
training, marketing (evangelism, word of mouth), third-party add-ons, even
new product ideas. And that's not including any extra sales you might make
on community/tribe items like t-shirts, stickers, and other gear.

Yes, there's still a budget... but we've all seen third-party fan/user
groups that got *no* support at all from "the mother ship" and yet thrived
and gave users a level of support and training the company didn't provide.
But there's still that little of issue of getting users *involved*, and for
that--the single biggest factor is getting users involved at a much earlier
path on their learning journey than typically happens.

This picture is from an earlier post:

[image: Buildingausercommunity]<http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/03/21/buildingausercommunity.jpg>
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