There’s a good post over on The Social Organization blog titled Social Media Is Not Community. How could I not love a post with a title like that? Rachel Happe writes:

I’m finding that there is a lot of confusion between the concept of social media and the concept of community. They are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing.  Social media can help foster communities but social media can be limited to allowing a conversation around content…which is not community.

She hits the nail on the head, and goes on to elaborate on the difference. To summarize / add to her thoughts:

• “Community” itself really has little to do with technology. The two operative elements of a community are people with something in common. Geographic location, political affiliation, usage of a particular product are all examples of “something in common.” The people who have that something in common have to be aware of each other and able to interact in some fashion.
• “Social media” is a class of technology that includes social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, etc.), social bookmarking (del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg, etc.), blogging (WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc.), microblogging (Twitter, Pownce, identi.ca, Plurk, etc.), and social aggregators (FriendFeed…and many of the social network sites); it’s hard to classify the different types of social media, because many that may fall primarily in one class also have functionality that puts them in another class (e.g., Twitter is a microblogging platform that also is a social network); it’s an exciting and confusing area to try to stay abreast of (but there are plenty of blogs that try!)

Certainly, social media enables communities to form in entirely new ways. But, communities are a “what,” while social media is a “how.” We often run into clients who say they want to “build a community” but actually mean simply that they want to “start using social media.” We find ourselves coaching them to back up one more step and understand that what they should be driving towards is “engaging with their prospects and customers more effectively.” Understanding why they want to do that (and almost every company should want to do it…but some are not as ready as they ought to be from an internal culture perspective) and then tackling how to go about it is the way to go. Without getting that clarity of purpose defined up front, there is a very real risk that what will get delivered is a mish-mash of cool but unused social media technology, labeled as a community, but operating as an echo chamber.