The ability of increasing a customer’s connectivity to your business before and after they buy is a huge advantage of online marketing. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explains the importance of a community in facilitating that connectivity:

If you want to create a change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced, and expressed and nurtured.

He explains how John Wesley spread Methodism by traveling around England and North America organizing small groups. Rebecca Wells book, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, went through 48 printings and 2.5 million copies because of book groups who flocked to it.

It’s easier to remember and appreciate something if you discuss it for hours with your best friends. It becomes a social experience, an object of conversation.

So now how is a community created? First start small:

Small close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic’s potential of a message or idea. That’s the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.