Is An Online Community Transferable?

After talking with a friend over lunch, I started thinking about the value of an online community. The first thing that comes to mind when I talk about community is Chris Brogan. He has successfully created a number of communities, with the Third Tribe being one of them.

Recently, I returned to a service called Cinch. Powered by BlogTalkRadio, Cinch allows users to create audio messages very much like Twitter allows tweets. Be it from a phone, mobile app, or website, users post updates and respond using their voice.

Through first hand observation, CinchCast.com has its own community of people who post messages and respond to one another. While the service encourages users to push their message to Facebook and Twitter, much of the interaction appears to happen on the site.

In the same way users interact on YouTube and DailyBooth, Cinch maintains its own culture. While fun and exciting, I wondered how wise it is to invest in community building within individual sites versus a single place like a blog or personal web site. I address this in a previous post entitled, "Respect The Community Where Your Readers Live And Engage With Them There."

In a response to my question, "Is an online community transferable?"  Jason A. Nunnelley wrote that a community is NOT transferable and it is us, the content contributors, that must send our message to the users. This means, I cannot take my YouTube community and ask them to engage on DailyBooth, or vice versa.

If this is the case, where should we invest our time? Should we continue to build multiple communities or aggregate it all within a single place? I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Also, in the audio clip below, I ask the question posed above.

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