LibraryThing – Still doing community the right way

There are a ton of companies out there that try community building, but so many simply muff the execution or just don’t get it in the first place. LibraryThing, in contrast, has got it figured out. They have a load of features and programs that reinforce the sense of casual, personal, book-loving community that permeates the site, while also enabling connections on a practical level. Beyond that, Tim and the LibraryThing team continually impress me by displaying such personal involvement and passion in the site, via blog posts, forum posts, or whatever. That kind of hard-to-fake commitment lends a warm, “this is MY community” feel to the place.

I won’t rattle off all the other bits and pieces that show they just *get* community here, except to state I wish I had more time to catalog my own personal book collection and participate on a deeper level. I would like to bring up one example however.

*photo from LibraryThing’s blog post.  

Given it’s the holiday season, the “SantaThing” holiday program is worth noting. It’s not overly complicated, basically a not-so-secret Santa where you buy (or at least recommend) books up to $20 for another LT member. LibraryThing actually orders the books and takes care of shipping, keeping a welcome veil of privacy in place while still helping the connections happen. You can even describe a friend’s “library” and have other would-be Santa’s recommend some books for them.

Pretty simple, and not earth-shatteringly unprecedented to the extent that you’d expect an uproar splashed above the fold on Techmeme. But that’s the beauty of it, and what makes it work is that this program is emblematic in its own way of the LibraryThing community as a whole.

• The user experience is based around the idea of discovering new books by connecting with others, seeing what they read, and engaging in a vibrant conversation throughout. SantaThing is just an extension of that concept, one more way to share and connect.
• It’s simplicity is another key – everything you do on LibraryThing feels like its natural and logical, without the over-thinking or over-engineering that plagues so many community sites.
• The personal passion of Tim and team is evident as well – just read through this forum topic (message #42), where Tim describes how the program runs basically breakeven (if that), and how last year they had to get staff’s spouses to use their credit cards to charge up some of the book orders. THAT is putting a face on the company behind the community, in a way that’s evident to all.

Again, I don’t mean to make too much of this one program. It’s a simple, and neat, idea that demonstrates that the most effective communities aren’t the result of some silver-bullet feature or marketing program. Everything you do has to just ooze passion and involvement in the community for it to work and more importantly, feel authentic.

You can see my profile here. As I mentioned, this is one of those “if only I had more time” activities, which explains my pathetically low book count. I’ll have to fire up the iSight barcode reader soon and load up my library.