These are ways smart media organizations create community their customers crave. Here's how it works.

People are social creatures. Few of us like being alone for long. We prefer to work and learn in groups. We like to know there are plenty of other people who are a lot like us, people who are doing same things we are.

When companies create a community of like-minded customers for people to be a part of, lots of people respond. This can be particularly important if your goal is to keep new prospects interested and current customers coming back. Creating your own community is critically important during slow economic times when every customer counts.

Here are five cheap and easy ways you can create your own online community right away!

1. Start your own discussion board. A few years ago, you had to be a computer programmer to do this, but today anyone can create their own online discussion. The one we have at InternetWriters comes free from bravenet.com. You can personalize look of your board as well as put your logo at top. This makes discussion look like a regular part of your web site.

Expect discussion to start off slow. Line up several experts to launch conversations and provide follow-up answers. These can be experts outside your company, but it is usually more reliable to have experts from inside your organization. Using your in- house experts can help emphasize how your staff has ability and desire to solve problems for customers. If you want to create image of expertise, your discussion board is a great way to do it.

If we go back before applets, say three years ago, streaming video, vivo, was "hot" topic. There is not a lot of talk of streaming video anymore. It has been incorporated into universe of web design, and has cooled considerably as a "hot" topic.

This is mostly because people have realized that streaming video has huge bandwidth. That even 30 minutes of quality programming is quite expensive to produce, and that we already a very effective streaming video technology filled with desultory content.

There seems to be a laypersons metric of website quality, but this metric is froth on sea, and changes with time. The issues involved in truly measuring website quality are subtler and more long-term. A website's quality or effectiveness cannot be assessed by simply pointing to presence or absence of a particular feature.

This past year, media have focussed heavily on ecommerce, as a buzzword, but this buzzword is almost never defined.

If we take ecommerce as current laypersons metric, hmmm, well, what is it? Do we mean capacity to process purchases online, secure server and closed sales? This is great, but only part of picture, many businesses want and need to create interest without needing to close a sale online.

If we take a wider definition of ecommerce, we might come up with something like: websites designed for easy use, whose primary purpose is commercial. Such websites frequently also allow online purchasing, but their first and foremost function is to provide product information. Some sales will close online, but many will not.