Dog lovers, civic-minded coders, Civil War buffs and cyclists have two things in common.

They are ardent about their special interest and thus they are more likely to be active in an online community.

They want to share their experiences and know-how with others who feel as passionate as they do about their special interest.

Some want more.  They’d like to lead like-mind folks or to team-up around shared experiences and/or accomplish something greater related to their interest.

Like hosting the hottest party everyone wants to attend, why not start the most popular online community that best serves the people who share your passionate interest? Like you, they are intrinsically motivated to meet, demonstrate expertise, learn from each other and belong to a tribe around their hot interest.  In hosting an online community you can accelerate your learning and friendships  — with others.

1.  Delight members in ways that attract funding from company sponsors

A. Such sponsors could, instead of providing traditional advertising, make special offers of free products “available to members-only” to those who are willing to give feedback on those products.

B. Company sponsors can also provide eCoupon-based prizes for winners of members-only contests.

For example, start an online community for kayakers where they vote, each month for their favorite, member-contributed tips related to themed contests such as best dinner-by-the-river meals. All members get a set number of votes. The top ten most popular contributors in each contest might get eCoupon prizes from REI, Trader Joe’s and others.

Providing eCoupons as prize providers is one of the most compelling, credible and cost-effective ways for companies to be visible in key niche markets and to pull winners through their doors, perhaps getting something else they see, as they redeem their coupons.

Such contests serve you as community host because they:

•  Attract new members

• Keep members engaged

• Inspire members to contribute high-quality, relevant tips

• Attract bloggers and your kind of media coverage as contests announcements are inherent news hooks

• Increase the total prize value over time as more members participate, creating a virtuous circle of ever larger membership and prize value.

2. Make your community top-of-mind in your niche

Here’ are four ways to become the go-to place for the people you want to attract and involve in your community.

Make your community the:

1. Only group serving your kind of interest, and/or
2. Biggest
3. Most exclusive
4. Best at something such as hosting a conference, fair, tradeshow, speed consulting or other kind of event.

Alternatively your community might be designed to offer and attract the best content or unique and valued service.

Here’s two examples:

1. Some fractional ownership sites morph into communities as individuals become acquainted via sharing. People may share rarely-used tools or other objects at DIYFractional. The natural next step is for those local communities to get networked, creating, for example, NeighborhoodGoods.

Others meet online to share specific, big ticket items including second homes, luxury cars or motorcycles, and even jets. Common interests and conversation beget community. See how you can adapt one kind of community design or purpose to serve another?

2. SheSpeaks provides a community of women with free samples of products that interest them in exchange for providing candid, specific feedback to the makers of those products.

Of course it helps to be the best at several things – for the people in your community.  Be the best place to:

•  Get answers, referral and/or recommendations

•  Buy and sell

•  Collectively advocate

•  Start a smaller special group within the larger community

•  Collaborate in some specific way that is facilitated in the community:

-       Cross-consult

-        Co-create a tip sheet, fundraiser, for-members-only service, product to sell, etc.

-        Crowdsource your niche

Can you imagine hosting an online gathering place related to your interest? It could be pro bono work, as your service to that community. Alternatively it could be your self-organized moonlighting job, perhaps in partnership with others — or it might morph into a full-time calling or job.

If you’d like to explore these possibilities,  here’s some places to learn more about cultivating an active, online community. For interviews, tips and strategies about community management for all kinds of communities, visit The Community Roundtable hosted by Rachel Happe and Jim Storer. For pithy, practical tips see Rich Milligan at Feverbee, Managing Communities’ author Patrick O’Keefe and community strategist Angela Connor. If your interest relates to a cause or non-profit there’s  no better place to start than at Beth Kanter’s blog. If you want your online community boost your company ties to key stakeholders, see Connie Bensen.

And, since community-building is all about specific, apt ways to collaborate see this  collaboration daily paper curated from over 100 experts — and create your own community-centered paper.

Also peruse these lists of collaboration-related resources and books and tools, where you can add your own favorites — and create your own community-attracting list. For non-profit communities Beth Kanter’s blog is a great place to start. Connie Benson has insights about company-centered community management.

The sum of us can be more powerful (and fun) than one of us… sometimes. The confounding thing is exactly how we make it happen.

Even when we have a strong desire to collaborate, we are  likely bump up against into each other because, as in love,  good intentions don’t always lead to mutually satisfying behavior. Yet, as in love and friendship, the togetherness of collaboration is where our most meaningful moments in life often happen. We have the opportunity to either step away or stay steadfast in creating something greater than we can alone. Sometimes we can even savor the bumpy moments along the way. What’s your favorite quote for collaborating? Here’s some ideas.

“Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept.” ~ Margaret Wheatley

“Maybe we are not here to see each other but to see each other through” ~ anonymous

“We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.” ~ Clay Shirky

“If you want to have great partnerships, be a great partner. Get beyond yourself. Give up the notion that you are well-rounded, and stop expecting your colleagues to be universally proficient. Incorporate someone else’s motivations into your view of the accomplishment. Loosen up.

Put aside your competitive nature, your prepackaged view of how the thing should be done, and your desire not to be inconvenienced with the imperfections of a fellow human being. Focus more on what you do for the partnership than what you get from it. Demonstrate trust and see if they don’t surprise you with their trustworthiness. Be slower to anger and quicker to forgive. And along the way, communicate continuously.” ~ Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller

“A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.” ~ David Bollier

“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.” ~ Oprah Winfrey

“We live in two worlds – order and chaos.  In the world of order, we plan, reflect, and think about what to do next.  In the world of chaos, things happen, we get things done, yet unpredictability persists.   In one world, we like to think we are in control.  In the other, we mingle together with increasing complexity, conflict, and uncertainty.” ~ David Spangler

“How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.” ~ Robert Sapolsky

“I am continually impressed by the inconsistency of sustained attention in relationships.  Partners complain about this all the time, and kids probably would too if they could. ‘We’ have evolved with the capacity to attend to each other, but it’s not exactly dominant in our lives. Imagine a world where it was!” ~ Thomas Bradbury

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” ~ Henry Winkler

“If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.” ~ Lyndon Johnson

“A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.” ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect, the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.” ~ E.M. Forrester

“Daily life is foreplay for relationships.” ~ Kate Feldman

“Structure influences behavior. Design spaces that make you feel “you are welcome here and that you came to the right place.” ~ Peter Block

“Safety is a basic human need.  People with a sense of security and belonging are stabilized for learning, creating, innovating. A group of wonderfully cared for, confident individuals generates great ideas.”  ~ John Sweeney

“Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional.” ~ Max Lucade

“Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that,” she said. “But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control.” ~ Sherry Turkel

“Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration. Working across organizational values can create tremendous value or destroy it – the hoarding and squabbling endemic in large companies can actually make collaboration more expensive than not attempting it.” ~ Morten T. Hansen

“Human beings are wired to care and give and it’s probably our best route to happiness.” ~ Dacher Keltner

“Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say “no”. If we cannot say “no” then our “yes” has no meaning. Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations, without having to justify them, or move quickly into problem solving. No is the beginning of the conversation for commitment.” ~ Peter Block

“Groups need both carrot and stick-based rules to remain stable.” ~ Robert Axelrod

“We need to look at front porches as crime fighting tools, treat picnics as public health efforts and see choral groups as occasions of democracy. We will become a better place when assessing social capital impact becomes a standard part of decision-making.” ~ Lew Feldstein

“Consequential strangers help us stretch beyond the relatively rigid boxes that the people who have known us the longest – our family and close friends – often put us into. Through interacting with people who do not know us as well, we are more free to experiment with ourselves, and less likely to have our new behaviors and roles reflected back to us by people who object, ‘But that’s not like you!’” ~ Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman

“Collaboration is more about find that sweet spot of mutual interest and understanding and being understood, than it is about speak well.” ~ Kare Anderson

“From American Idol to The Matrix participatory media – where old and new media converge by involving fans – is influencing our culture by creating new forms of interactive storytelling. Yet by enabling people to participate in such various media they can converge as a crowd to alter the story to create new modes of engagement, some not necessarily endorsed by the creator – or the brands that back them.” ~ Henry Jenkins

“In the long history of humankind…those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” ~ Charles Darwin

“Effective collaboration is about maximizing time, talent and tools to create value. The old way was the pass-along approach. I do my job and then pass along my work product to you. You do your piece of it and pass it along to somebody else.” ~ Evan Rosen

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”  ~ Carl Jung

“Diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving complex problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.” ~ Scott E. Page

“Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully – and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.” ~ Patrick Lencioni

“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.” ~ Miles Davis

“Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other’s prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.” ~ Cass Sunstein

“Being in a band is always a compromise. Provided that the balance is good, what you lose in compromise, you gain by collaboration.” ~ Mike Rutherford

“Some of the power has shifted from companies to people. Using social media tools (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc.) more individuals are creating semi-spontaneous ‘groundswells’ of opinions to which companies and other institutions are realizing they must respond.  From marketing to consumers organizations are being pulled into engaging with individuals.” ~ Charlene Li

“No idea will work if people don’t trust your intentions toward them.” ~ Marcus Buckingham

“Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn’t conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn’t decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.” ~ Steven Johnson

“Trust is the glue that holds relationships together.” ~ Price Pritchett

“In an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person’s contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that’s more responsive to the changing environment. “ ~ Keith Sawyer

“Human beings are to independent action, what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but mostly we don’t… Instead, we do what we do because of what those around us are doing (Whatever our minds and our cultures tell us). It is our innate nature as “herd” animals that cause mass movements, not the influence of a handful of influential individuals.” ~ Mark Earls

“Be more interested than interesting.” ~ Mark Goulston

“Hot groups have members who are task-obsessed and full of passion. They share a style which is “intense, sharply focused, and full bore. Members feel engaged in an important, even vital and personally ennobling mission; their task dominates all other considerations; and although such intense teams tend to remain intact only for a relatively short period of time, that time is remembered nostalgically and in considerable detail by its members.” ~ J. Lipman-Blumen and H. Leavitt

“For productive collaboration adopt five principles: involve the relevant stakeholders, build consensus phase by phase, design a process map, designate a process facilitator and harness the power of group memory.” ~ David Straus and Thomas C. Layton

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ~ Plato

“Trafficking organizations these days take the form of decentralized networks that shift continuously, assuming new configurations as opportunities present themselves and then morphing again to meet the needs of the next moment. They don’t specialize in a single commodity like cocaine. Instead, they move whatever goods present an opportunity for profit in the present moment; drugs today, arms tomorrow, people the next day and then knock-off designer handbags after that. Yet government agencies’ understanding of the organizational structure of international trafficking networks is dangerously out of date. They go after the illicit trades as if they had a hierarchical structure with information and power flowing up and down a chain of command.” ~ Moises Naim

“If your friend’s friend’s friend (whom you may not have even met) is obese, a smoker or a zealot of some kind then it is a lot more likely that you will be too.” ~ James H. Fowler

“Hackman’s paradox: Groups have natural advantages: they have more resources than individuals; greater diversity of resources; more flexibility in deploying the resources; many opportunities for collective learning; and, the potential for synergy. Yet studies show that their actual performance often is subpar relative to “nominal” groups (i.e. individuals given the same task but their results are pooled.) The two most common reasons: groups are assigned work that is better done by individuals or are structured in ways that cap their full potential.” ~ Richard Hackman

“The best advice for parents is not to shelter their children from the suffering in the world, and to engage them in doing something to get involved.” ~ Marc Keilburger

“Some of us cry when we watch sad movies or wince when we see athletes fall. This sense of shared experience is at the core of human experience. Because our brain has mirror neurons, we are capable of interpreting facial expressions of pain or joy, the first step towards feeling empathy, which causes an instinctively imitative response – the chameleon effect. That ‘mirroring’ response enables two people to literally see they are more alike in that moment.  That similarity evokes familiarity and thus a feeling of comfort that can lead to mutual trust with others.  When these mirror neurons do not work an individual may not be aware of another’s feelings and thus act in socially incorrect ways.” ~ Marco Iacoboni

“All for one, one for all.” ~ Alexander Dumas

“There are three stages of organizational development in this networked era. 1. Fortress – an organization where there are insiders and outsiders, and the two rarely meet or interact; 2. Transactional – an organization that is engaged with their community, but with the sole focus of transactions, such as getting people to sign up for an event or make a donation; and 3. Transparent – an organization that fully engages and empowers their community to accomplished shared goals.” ~ Beth Kanter and Allison Fine

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“The world you inhabit is the world you make. Your reputation precedes you, biasing the way new colleagues deal with you. Your first moves, friendly or hostile, tip the balance for future interactions. When you exhibit trust, you will most often find trustworthiness. When you are selfish, you will most often find selfishness. When you compete, others must resort to competition. If you choose to play the game strictly for your own advantage, your attempts at collaboration will indeed be, (as Thomas Hobbes said), ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’” ~ Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller

“Let all humanity be your sect.” ~ Sikh saying

A sign of the growing popularity of all kinds of collaboration is the growing number of books on some aspect of the topic.  What are your favorites? Here are some I’ve come across:

Alone Together: Sociable Robots, Digitized Friends, and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude by Sherry Turkle.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop.

Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond.

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results by Morten T. Hansen.

Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Model by Robert Axelrod.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler.

Consensus Through Conversation: How to Achieve High-Commitment Decisions by Larry Dressler.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.

Creating a Culture of Collaboration: The International Association of Facilitators Handbook by Sandy Schuman.

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball.

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.

The Culture of Collaboration by Evan Rosen.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson.

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges by Andrew McAfee.

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni.

The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations by Robert L. Cross.

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide by Cass R. Sunstein.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li.

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration by Keith Sawyer.

Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature by Mark Earls.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky.

Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization by J. Lipman-Blumen and J. & H. Leavitt.

How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions by David Strauss and Thomas C. Layton.

How to Make Meetings Work by Michael Doyle and David Strauss.

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moises Naim.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein.

Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances by J. Richard Hackman.

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World by Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling.

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others by Marco Iacoboni.

Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia and Frances Anderson.

The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion by Rich Ling.

The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule by Donald W. Pfaff and Edward O. Wilson.

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks by Mark Buchanan.

Organizing Genius – The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren Bennis.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators by Patrick Lencioni.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison.

The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player: Becoming the Kind of Person Every Team Wants by John C. Maxwell.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold.

Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin.

Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future by Margaret J Wheatley.

Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves by Adam L. Penenberg.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler.

Why Teams Don’t Work by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith.

X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman.

Leading a small workshop?  Like to find out, upfront, how much they already know? Or how they feel about your topic?  Try a fun, audience involver called the Spectrogram. This exercise also helps them feel heard, learn a bit about each other and get closer. Plus it is simple to set up and to do – as I’ve discovered after using it in nine interactive seminars.

Beforehand place a line of colored tape across open space on the floor of the workshop  – preferably in front of the room. Make it about 20 yards long. Mark one end of the tape “Strongly Agree” and the other end “Strongly Disagree.” Make cross-marks on the tape at the appropriate places for  “25%”, “50%” and “75%.”

Then ask attendees their reactions to two extremes of a statement that relates to your topic. SocialSignal (they borrowed this exercise from Aspiration) describes what happens next when they do this in their workshop on adopting digital communication tools:

“We’ll tell participants the two extreme statements. They represent the opposite poles of a spectrum. Then we ask them to line up between those poles on the tape – depending where they feel they fit in on that continuum. We might ask ‘How comfortable are you with communicating online?’, and offer the two poles ‘It makes me hyperventilate with sheer terror’ and ‘You mean there’s another way to communicate?’ Then we ask a few participants at various places on the spectrum to explain why they chose this particular point.”

After that exercise you’ll know some of their hot buttons and strong interests. You can adjust your approach to the level of knowledge you’ve observed, first-hand from their comments. Plus you can refer to their comments as conduct the seminar. That proved might popular when I could tie a technique to a point raised in the Spectrogram exercise.

Sometimes participants think if questions they wish had been asked. That’s what Beth Kanter discovered at this workshop for non-profits called Penguin Day.

At the Canne Film Festival Peter Broderick described new online opportunities for indy filmmakers to create, promote and distribute their work. He’s not alone.  “Independents” of all kinds are making their own media, leaving how-to-templates in their wake for others to modify for their own use. Ever dream of hosting a community radio show, co-creating an ezine for your club or writing a column about your community or hobby?

But you are daunted by the details. You don’t want to get engulfed in the technology. And you’d like the camaraderie of creating your media with others.

Well, musicians, teachers, city council members, cause advocates and others are enjoying low-cost ways to attract audiences, supporters and customers.  How?  By making their own media – and so can you. For us non-geeks who need a techy translater to describe exactly how to use the new media tools let me introduce David Mathison. By the way, Broderick’s story is in Mathison’s new book.)

This veteran community media activist describes the “me” tools for getting your message out (podcasts, blogs, videoblogs, etc). Then hear about the “we” tools to join forces with others to share information and news (social networks, community radio, TV and newspapers, creative commons, wikis, community media centers).

His book, Be the Media, “is a text and bible on how modern methods permit every person and organization to reach an audience that only a few years ago was reserved for the multi-billion dollar media conglomerates” according to Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Ben H. Bagdikian.

If you want to be heard on behalf of your community, cause or group, here are other helpful resources I recommend: Media Alliance, Beth’s Blog, Creative Commons and The Nonprofit Technology Network.

 … even when you have few resources. Or to make your small donation matter more.

Want to launch a campaign to spruce up your nearby park?

Like to share your expertise with others, for the greater good?

Like to track the success of a project you supported?

For your cause or club, like a user-friendly way find the best ways to accomplish more with social media tools?  No matter how small or large your “do good” goal, hear how to accomplish more with less in this interview with micro-philanthropy, social fundraising guru and Social Actions founder, Peter Deitz. “Our mission is to put actions in front of people who are most likely to take part,” says Deitz.  Rather than creating cause campaigns, he’s “aggregating campaigns where people connect around “actionable opportunities. Deitz told Beth Kanter, he’s creating  tools that “will assist in planning and implementing a peer-to-peer social change campaign.

Social actions will recommend platforms to use and best practices for spreading the campaign through social networks. It will also feature an after-action survey covering the tools used and the strategies implemented.This information will feed back into the system that recommends platforms and best practices.”

Like artificial intelligence, he’s creating a system that will get smarter as more people use it – a true Me2We approach.  That’s powerful support for person-to-person fundraising.

Like Micro Credit Enterprises, Social Actions reflect the new model of low-cost, all-virtual operations. His start-up site enables you to invite others to join you in supporting very specific social action.

Every part of his tiny, virtual organization exemplifies how you can leverage free or low-cost social medial tools to launch an active, powerful service. For example, his social network uses the free Ning service.

Fractured Atlas manages the group’s non-profit status. And, via an introduction from AspirationTech, the site’s capacity is being strengthened by a worker-owned and operated technology collective called The Brattleboro Tech Collective.

Funding sprung out of a NetSquared conference.  Perhaps these resources can support you, too, in helping your cause.

In art class we were asked to draw a familiar object.  I picked something simple.  A tire.  No one could recognize it. And yet, after reading The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures I was able to draw a description of SmartPartnering and another on storyboarding.

Let people literally see your idea to adopt it faster or to buy.  Read this fun book by Dan Roam.  Dan gives you a method based on our six ways of seeing:1. who/what    2. how much   3. where   4. when   5. how    6. why. These ways affect each step in our visually thinking/creating process:
1.    Identify the topic/issue
2.    Develop an idea/approach, to
3.    Express a solution.

Herb Kelleher intuited this approach when he used a bar napkin to show investors how Southwest Airlines could beat competitors.

I thought of Dan’s book when Ellen spoke to me after my session at the IABC conference in New York last week. Her firm, Cognac shows that even complex topics can be understood in ten minutes or less – with the right “big picture” image.   Since our brains retain visual information much better (David Melcher says 89% more) than text, this is mighty good news.

Even better, hear Dan lead a teleseminar on July 9th. It’s free.  And he’ll be joined by several bright minds: Seth Godin, Anil Dash and Rich Sloan.

Also hear my interviews with two other gurus in the fast-growing field of visual thinking, Lee LeFever and David Sibbet. Here’s Carl Gude’s visual shorthand for politics.

Ok. If you are still not comfortable drawing your own explanation, to illustrate your text, here’s some free resources for drawings, clipart and photos suggested by Meryl Evans.

Or discover simple ways to make and distribute “how to” videos.

By the way you can hear BlogTalkRadio’s John Havens interview me at IABC.