Sadly, a critical spotlight has recently been directed at the Internet's virtual communities. These online neighborhoods are easy to join, global in reach and encourage participation by anyone who shares the community's views or interests. They exist only in cyberspace, yet their impact can be very real and close to home. Indeed, the tragedy in Littleton, Colo., makes painfully clear the potential harm that such groups can inflict, even in quiet suburbs and local schools.
Devastating as that situation has been, however, we should not overlook the positive aspect of online assemblies. By virtue of their existence on the Internet, they can transcend barriers of geography, economic class and politics and offer a platform for interaction, camaraderie and debate that is available to all of us. Virtual communities are the Information Era equivalent of the old New England town meeting, a democratic forum that holds the best as well as the worst of human expression.
In today's frenetic business environment, these groups enable professionals to stay in touch with their peers, even if they can't make the annual meeting of their association. They give employees a way to extend their occupational skills and credentials without expensive travel and time away from the office. And with employer loyalty now a museum piece, they offer every working person a place they can count on -- a kind of virtual Cheers -- to which they can return over and over again and always find a friend or colleague.
Are they popular? Associations and societies are enjoying a huge increase in activity among their members who can now swap office jokes, work tips and job leads in their online "clubhouses." Alumni groups, trade organizations, fraternities and sororities all have seen a dramatic increase in participation when they provide a meeting place in cyberspace. In addition, there are now more than 70,000 newsgroups -- self-managed communities of shared interests on the Internet -- covering a staggering array of topics from architecture to zoology.
These public meeting places can be fertile ground for recruitment. Many of their participants are successfully and happily employed; they are the quintessential passive job seeker. Others are actively engaged in a job search and networking online just as they would at an association meeting or trade event. To engage these individuals, however, a recruiter must respect the culture of their community and play by its rules. Every interaction must be carefully framed to avoid interrupting their discourse or interfering with their rituals. In short, recruiting can occur, but only on terms acceptable to the community's members.
To eliminate such impediments, we're likely to see a private, gated version of public communities emerge online in the near future. These virtual assemblies will be open only to select cohorts of the workforce. They will be sponsored and privately managed by recruiting or employing organizations as a way of building an inventory of human capital upon which they can draw whenever they wish. From the individual's perspective, the activities at the best of these spots will be identical to that of a newsgroup. For the recruiter, however, they will provide a new and powerful method for establishing long-term relationships with candidates.
Who's building such communities? Although just about any employer or recruiting firm could, only a few have launched an online neighborhood, and all of their initiatives are still under development. A particularly promising example is being built for IT professionals by EarthWeb. Its community will encourage peer-to-peer interaction via an array of activities that include authoring and critiquing technical papers and developments in the IT field, providing and receiving support and assistance with on-the-job problems, and networking for fun and career development.
In addition, EarthWeb has integrated recruiters into the community through its recent acquisition of DICE.com. By positioning DICE as an integral component of the neighborhood experience, it has given the site preferential access to and credibility among the community's members. Those advantages, in turn, are likely to translate into benefits for both DICE clients and EarthWeb members. The clients will see more choice and higher quality among the candidates DICE is able to deliver for position vacancies. And the IT professionals who participate in EarthWeb will enjoy broader employment opportunities and more advancement potential.
That's the positive side of virtual communities, a side we must not dismiss, even when other virtual communities let us down.
