The ‘netnography’ exercise demonstrated a method of understanding an online community by observing it as an active participant.  This in turn provides some insights into what appear to build communities (and what doesn’t).

In my professional practice I support an online community so this exercise has been useful in giving me a framework to study it.  From a purely practical standpoint I was also interested to find out what literature existed around how to establish and build a community from scratch.  There are numerous guide books available and many are of the ‘how I made my fortune / get rich quick variety”, but there are others that appear to be grounded in research and I was interested to see how well this mapped to the Kozinets (2010) chapter.  This Thinglink  shows that a particular example I selected at random maps well to Kozinets’ findings and other literature referenced in the chapter.  For some reason the Thinglink refuses to embed in this post so I’ve provided a link instead.

https://www.thinglink.com/scene/904718600495955971

References

Kozinets, R. V. (2010) Chapter 2 ‘Understanding Culture Online’, Netnography: doing ethnographic research online. London: Sage. pp. 21-40.