Creating Online Community

Recently, the creator of the online comic "Johnny Saturn" posed a question on his forum about how one builds community online. Here is the answer I posted on his forum, slightly edited. He liked it, and I was quite proud of it myself (mainly because someone liked it). Perhaps you'll find it useful. Perhaps, someday, I'll find it useful, too:

...I follow a couple forums for humor sites that really have created community (see www.jaypinkerton.com or www.pointlesswasteoftime.com -- some of it is NSFW, if that matters to you).

Part of the community feel is that the people involved are invested in the site somehow -- their forum entries contribute to the site, they entertain and critique each other, they're creative together via humor. And they show off. I think part of it also is that people feel like they get to know these humorists on a semi-personal level -- they're part of something (Pinkerton, for example, has met a woman, taken jobs at National Lampoon and Cracked and moved from Canada to LA to New York since he started his forum). PWOT has been around long enough that there are core members of the community who meet offline once in awhile and clearly care about each other.

They seem to involve a good number of friends and fans in driving and moderating the forum and they have nurtured the community for many years. The folks who started the forums also contributed to other forums over the years, made internet friends and built a network that way.

Not an easily duplicated formula... I think it's hard to build the forum around Komikwerks because it's not a Johnny Saturn forum for Johnny Saturn fans. You might consider building a blog or community around the Johnny Saturn site and offering opportunities for fans to contribute ideas and art, letting us know where you are and how you're promoting the comic, offering sneak previews, introducing other projects, etc.

Just a thought (and I'm in PR, so I think about these things) ... I agree that vibrant message boards are the exception rather than the rule ... and I bet you'd get a pretty good readership for a blog...

What do you think?