Great communities inspire great conversations. Online communities are no different.

Fred Wilson once said in his blog, “modern [online] community building isn’t easy, but if there is one thing the Internet has taught me over the past 15 years, large engaged communities are incredibly powerful things, both commercially and socially. Building them is important and ultimately very valuable work.”

One of the definitions of the word “community” is “body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a large society.”

The Internet allows people with common interests, be it Mac enthusiasts or IT people, come together even if they are “scattered through a large society.” People always want to belong to some kind of community where they can share their thoughts, opinions and interests with others.

Every business has the opportunity to take advantage of this phenomenon and unite their customers and fans in an online community with a common interest – their brand.

Many brands build online communities hoping that it would be an easier way to talk to their customers. They keep creating and pushing content out to their fans, failing to realize that many of them join an online community not because they want to listen to brands, but rather talk and share their experiences with each other.

Online communities can generate valuable content for your brand if you would just let your fans talk. Their opinions might not always be positive, but the fact that your fans talk about you already means they are interested in your business. And even negative feedback can be turned into a learning experience. Just make sure to address those comments in a timely manner (watch for a blog post on crisis management soon).

Sephora’s “Beauty Talk” online community on the website had exactly that result: “we realized that…clients were not only trying to talk with us – they were trying to talk with each other. And they were actually engaging in ways we had no idea they would,” said the VP of interactive media at Sephora.

A strong online community, where people have the freedom to express their opinions and know they are being heard, nurtures community leaders that can become brand advocates both online and offline.

Facebook is a great platform for your business to start building online communities. It is important to give your customers a voice, even though it might be uncomfortable at first. Ask questions, encourage conversations, monitor and listen. Your fans have a lot to say about your brand, don’t limit their ability to interact with each other and with you.

For those who have not been to Kansas City, Kansas, “tourism” is not a word that springs to mind when you visit KCMO’s sister to the west. I like KCK a lot, don’t get me wrong. But to the outsider unaware of the town’s hidden gems, words like “blight,” “depression” and “inertia” are far more likely to come up.

It’s towns like KCK that need social media the most.

Because despite its rough outer edges, the crown jewel of Wyandotte County boasts some of the best ethnic eateries, local heritage fests, an amazing annual music tradition in the Street Blues Festival, plus top-notch destinations around the Legends at Village West, which is the home to the Wizards and the T-Bones — potentially the area’s only winning pro sports teams. (Note: They’re building a new stadium for the Wizards.)

From a tourism perspective, it’s a challenge to sell KCK. Despite these great attractions, the town has its obvious hurdles, and chances are very great that the Wyandotte County Tourism and Visitors Bureau doesn’t have the budget to pay a PR or ad agency to come in and give the place a makeover.

That’s why it’s so great that the Bureau is using DIY-style social media to tell KCK’s story and highlight its better sides.

Even though she was born last summer and won a national award for her Summer Scoop campaign, I didn’t hear about Dottie until yesterday. I got to attend an awards luncheon put on by the Tourism Bureau, and at everyone’s place setting was an ice cream scoop with a card tied to it listing the social media destinations for this summer’s “Dottie’s Inside Scoop” campaign: blog, Facebook page, Twitter and YouTube.

They showed this trailer at the luncheon. It was probably one of the first “web 2.0″ styled videos many of the smalltown businessmen and politicians in the room had seen, and I’m not exaggerating. (For me, it was the first WMV formatted video I’ve seen in a while, if that tells you anything about the tools they have to work with for this campaign.) After the video ended, the Tourisim Bureau lady hosting the lunch felt compelled to explain that, yes, the video didn’t look professional, but that’s how it’s supposed to be.

In any case, I like where KCK is going with this. Sure, it could be executed better. (I’d like Dottie to keep the camera rolling, forget the slideshows and improvise more.) But for a struggling city that desperately needs to promote its best points on a tight budget, this is definitely the way to go.

I just hope Dottie hits El Camino Real for some tacos this summer. That place is unreal.

All it takes is a community.

When CBS Radio ousted Adam Carolla from his four-hour morning show in favor of a cheaper music format, the comedian and radio personality recorded his own farewell broadcast, but he didn’t know what to do with it. A friend of his suggested he begin podcasting. That was February 2009.

Within a few months, The Adam Carolla Podcast had become so in-demand, the technology to support it cost $13,000 a month. It was downloaded a total of 50 million times last year and was named iTunes’ best podcast.

As Fast Company’s compelling portrait of Carolla’s podcasting success explains, it’s all about building an audience then feeding them fresh, exclusive, free content on a regular basis:

By aggregating a devoted audience and then experimenting with new ways of interacting with it, Carolla is both taking advantage of an opportunity and creating one. Analysts at eMarketer predict that U.S. podcast listenership will approach 38 million by 2013, more than double 2008’s audience. Meanwhile, traditional media has mostly used podcasting to repurpose preexisting TV and radio content — the same mistake newspapers and magazines made with the Web, opening the door to outsiders.

Indeed, the gate is wide open for media entrepreneurs like Carolla to step in and give people what traditional media has been failing to provide for years: programming tailored specifically for them.

Unencumbered by commercial breaks, FCC regulations or misguided attempts at mass appeal, podcasts like Carolla’s, by definition, reach only receptive/niche audiences.

We already follow our favorite celebrities on platforms like Twitter. How long will be before all the top comedians, commentators, talk-show hosts and other creators of personally branded entertainment content are exclusively using their own channels to distribute their product to their fans?

It’s already happening in music. One day, entertainment conglomerates like NBC and CBS will face the same problems major labels are facing.

And for the independent, entrepreneurial artist like Carolla, the profit margins are there.

He’s got the Lamborghini in his office to show it.

Trix are for kids. What’s for grown-ups?

Kashi, yo.

You may have noticed the 26-year-old, La Jolla-based company’s cereals, waffles, snacks, pizzas and healthy versions of Hot Pockets on the shelves at the grocery store, each with the proprietary blend of seven whole grains and sesame.

Had you asked us a few days ago whether Kashi was a brand or a type of grain, we couldn’t have told you for sure. We just know that the Go Lean Crunch is good stuff — like Cap’n Crunch for adults. Yet good for you.

Kashi, it turns out is more than just a brand. But first, that funny name. According to the website:

After considering names such as “Gold’n Grains” and “Graino,” we decided on Kashi, a synthesis of “kashruth” or kosher/pure food and “Kushi,” the last name of the founders of American Macrobiotics. Later, we discovered that Kashi has international meanings: porridge in Russian, happy in Chinese, and energy in Japanese.

Fortuitous, no? That’s not all you’ll get from the amazing Kashi.com, either. In addition to a very transparent approach to providing a company portrait, the people behind Kashi.com have created a site that’s loaded with good content and is supportive of what appears to be an active community.

Way more than you’d expect from a cereal company, right?

Here are some ways Kashi is earning the trust of its customers and, in doing so, building a real community around its brand.

1. Giving value away from the brand.

The site is loaded with helpful information about healthy living as well as engaging challenges and activities that go way beyond simple interaction with a product. Articles under the Natural Learning section, like the video-enhanced “Get the Most from Your Farmer’s Market” and the helpful “Guide to Better Sleep” don’t mention Kashi at all. They’re useful in and of themselves. It’s a perfect model for a blog.

The same could be said of the Lifestyle Tools section, which is one of several portals into the community. Through a three-layered approach of Challenges, Accomplishments and Community Surveys, the site invites real and practical methods of improving your life and connecting with others interested in doing the same. Again, little to no mention of Kashi.

The Natural Nearby internal application connects users to recommend local organic and healthy vendors near them. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of functionality yet, but what a concept.

2. Promoting the Greater Good

Of course the people at Kashi are passionate about their products. But rather than focus on what they sell, they find common ground with customers in an overarching interest in and passion for self-improvement.

The company learned early on that people weren’t going to come running to some new health-food product just because they like bland flood. Quite the opposite, in fact, especially when Kashi began in the unhealthy old ’80s. The solution? Don’t market to the 55 people who are seeking healthy grain-based foods; market to the millions of people who want to make their lives healthier. That’s way bigger than a bowl of cereal.

3. Knowing not just what its customers want but who they are.

Trix knows what it’s customers want: sugar and fun. And so the flash game on the brand’s website is just as addictive as the cereal. (Seriously, that game is pretty awesome.)

Kashi, on the other hand, knows that its customers are intelligent, conscientious grown-ups who don’t want to waste their time on bells and whistles. They want actionable information they can use.

At the same time, everybody likes to have fun, and that’s what the green-jumpsuited Support Squad is for. Rather than a cute animal pimping the brand, these are actual company employees who appeal by being normal as they demonstrate things you can do if you join the Kashi community. (Hey, Bobby, you’re falling down, man.)

4. Building a lasting community.

Though valuable, Facebook and Twitter are obvious.

Likewise, it’s easy enough to build social networking features into a website. Services like Ning allow anyone to do this for free. But powering the community with activities and challenges that go beyond the simple forum approach elevate it from being a discussion board or Facebook fan page to an accountability group and, even more than that, a culture.

The benefit to Kashi from a marketing perspective is that they get a richer view into customers’ lives. They get to see how they live — or, perhaps more importantly, how they want to live. And then, by providing them with information, support and of course, products, to help customers reach their own meaningful, life-enhancing goals …

In what language does Kashi mean “trust”?

Two things we always stress to our clients at Locker Partner: building community, achieving transparency.

Whether your business model is built on transactions with customers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B), social media can be a powerful tool in achieving both of these aims, and more.

But there are still many businesses leaders in the B2B realm who are reluctant to engage in social media. This may be because they doubt it’s useful to spend time and resources cultivating a presence on networking sites populated by individuals looking to engage in “social” interactions.

Taking it a step further, many businesses are worried about compromising their brand security, losing their reputation as “respectable” companies by playing around on silly sites like Twitter.

No B2B company (or any B2C, for that matter) should jump into social media marketing without a plan. No one should do it just because. But it is an undeniable fact that B2B companies that have engaged in social media effectively have reaped tangible rewards.

In “Crushing the Myth of B2B Social Media” Jay Baer writes:

Yes, social media applies to B2B. In fact, social media can be MORE transformative for a B2B company than a B2C company. This is because B2B has a smaller potential customer base, a higher average price point, and a customer decision funnel that is more influenced by word of mouth and reputation. Turning your customers into advocates and marketers on behalf of your brand pays off a lot more when you’re selling $10,000 pieces of manufacturing equipment, than it does when you’re selling $3 cans of Pringles.

Baer goes on to cite MarketingProfs’ State of Social Media Marketing report, which shows in number-crunching charts and graphs that B2B companies who use social media marketing do see returns. That’s both regardless of the platform (whether Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) and regardless of the size of company.

This is all because B2B, just like B2C, is all about cultivating relationships (community) and communicating well  (transparency).

In the very near future, it won’t be a question of whether B2B marketers use social media. In fact, we’re betting that the phrase “social media” will rarely be heard in casual business talk. Facebook, Twitter and their future descendants will be so commonly adopted in marketing plans, that B2B businesses won’t even think twice about using them.

No more than they think twice about picking up the phone.

Further reading: 10 Things a B2B Company Can Do to Be Social Now

Even if you’re not a fan of this Chicago group’s Nintendocore — super-sugary powerpunk that uses 8-bit video game sound effects as ornamentation — you’ve gotta admire the marketing savvy of I Fight Dragons (whose music actually is pretty catchy).

Not even a year into its career as a band and still without label support, I Fight Dragons has already shown more online marketing prowess than many established acts and labels have in years and years of making and selling music. First, check out the group’s social networking page, which cleverly integrates the vintage video game aesthetic with links to IFD’s many social media destinations, Twitter being the most prominent at the moment. Side note to bands: Having an official website is the way to go, rather than relying on MySpace or a similar site to host your main web presence. (That moment has passed.)

But beyond the web grooviness, I Fight Dragons has also made huge strides in its nine months of existence toward building a community of fans who are willing to get our their wallets and support the band in a real way. But before the group started selling music, it gave it away for free — and a lot of it at that. In a guest post at We Are Listening this past summer titled How to Get 200 Fans a Week, IFD frontman Brian Mazzaferri extols the virtues of flat-out giving away music, trading music for email addresses and interacting with fans on social media. He wrote:

This seems like a no-brainer, but it actually takes a LOT of work. We’re on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, our Blog, and TheSixtyOne every day, talking with people and being involved in conversations. I’m NOT talking about one-way, blast-yourself-out-there stuff like MySpace adding. I’m talking about joining in conversations on Twitter that you have something to add to. About commenting earnestly on music you like. About joining a community, not trumpeting your own message.

Amen, Brian!

Then, having built up a supportive fan network through online engagement and musical generosity (”Regularly give away stuff that’s way too good to give away,” says Brian), the band was ready to cash in. Rather than release its first physical product in the old-fashioned way of putting out a CD, I Fight Dragons decided to sell Lifetime Membership USB Drives: fetching little units that “come preloaded with all of the music we’ve ever released (including email-list only tracks), and they guarantee the owner a free digital copy of anything we ever release, as well as free admission to any live show of ours now and forever.”

The band chose to make only 100, pricing them at $100 each, and had no problem selling out in two days. Mazzaferri notes that usually only famous/established acts manage to sell high-priced commemorative items (see: the Pixies), but he feels that his band was able to pull this off by establishing themselves as big givers first, then by setting up this membership package as a gift that keeps on giving.

And not long ago, this level of ingenuity would’ve been prohibitively expensive for a band on Dragons’ level to see through to a finished product. But with the advent of sites like Bandcamp and Storenvy, DIY sales of custom physical products is becoming as easy for bands as selling digital music has been.

But, as I Fight Dragons demonstrates, you’ve still gotta build that community first.