Justin Thorp envisions a world wherein online community managers are staffers for members of Congress and key government offices and personnel.  I like the way he thinks, What if a Congressman or Government Agency had a Community Manager?

What if a congressman or government agencies had a community manager? This would be a person that everyone in the community knew. On the Web site, there’d be a photo of them and every possible way to get ahold of them. They’d hang out at coffee shops, bars, churches, town squares, barbershops, or any public place where their constituency spent their time. I could easily walk up to them and talk to them about what my problem is or what’s on my mind.

Members of the House and the Senate have minions to respond to email, letters, calls, and faxes — they should have OCMs as well, of course.

I woke up to an amazing article written by Jonathan Trenn, The fallacy of community, and I responded in a comment to a pretty passionate article and a passionate comment string, and here’s what I wrote — and I have expanded the argument below, so it is an expansion. Via Marketing Conversation.

Gosh, I don’t know what to say here… there are so many different types of communities, many of which can surely be manufactured. What every successful community requires is community leadership. Community leadership can be organic and emergent or they can be hired in the form of online community managers or facilitators. A strong leadership — people who have skin in the game — is more important than a good web application; also, these community leaders are often the main draw to the community and can be the difference between keeping or losing your members when a competitor comes to town.

Here are some types of communities, as pulled from Wikipedia:

• Communities of Action
• Communities of Circumstance
• Communities of Interest
• Communities of Position
• Communities of Practice
• Communities of Purpose

Many of these can be created, in much the same way that one may create a garden. I think the biggest problem with these sort of things — community-creation — is that people do it wrong, and they have been doing it wrong for at least a decade.

Back in the day, when I worked at Caucus Systems, we manufactured communities for businesses — virtual teams, virtual conferences, and whatnot. And it worked quite well, to be sure, and they were powerful and transforming.

What most companies don’t understand is that communities require facilitators and managers. They always have. AOL hired community managers back in 1995 when they created communities, the Well and Caucus and Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms have paid and unpaid community managers and facilitators.

The mistake that most companies make is that they assume that if they build it, they will come. It is not true. You can create a Wiki, a Message Board, Forums, or a Blog and it doesn’t mean anything at all.

In fact, people will spend all of this time putting together a message board, fill it with conversation-starters, and then open the doors, promote the hell out of it, and still nothing will happen.

What is required to manufacture a community is passionate members — and they can be paid. However, if they’re paid, you need to hire them from a pool of OD experts or a pool of topical experts — or, you can poach them from another community, always the best way.

So, WordPress and phpBB are not killer apps, the killer apps are the people who start and maintain conversation, the people who re-seed conversation, the people who catalyze conversation, the people who show interest and ask questions, and the people who protect the other members through active moderation.

In fact, I am an expert in this. You can restart an old thread, you can catalyze a conversation, you can break out an off-topic thread to a new topic hope.  It is an art, but it is an art that anyone who knows conversation, who knows facilitation, and who knows people, can do — and it happens all the time “organically” on all of the online boards we’re so in love with.

Hell, get WordPress, phpBB, or Wikimedia for free — or buy vBulletin for a little money — and put the rest of your budget towards hiring professional Community Managers.

Hell, if it weren’t for Jonathan Trenn on Marketing Conversation, we would be done for on this blog. He’s the glue and he’s the only reason why you are all here.