Originally published January 2009, Today's Garden Center

Creating a Community

A community serves many functions. It brings people together in a shared interest, provides support for individuals from the strength of the whole and functions as an organizing element for a people in a geographic area. While there are probably many other more eloquent descriptions, I’d like to start here. In researching the concept of community, I ‘Googled’ the phrase and came up with over 641,000 pages including an entry for community from the digital community of Wikipedia.

One search result I liked came from keithhopper.com. It was a blog entry describing the nagging problem of defining the term ‘community’, that has become such a ‘buzz’ phrase these days.

“Aside from locality, communities can be defined by their interaction, like a discussion group community. A community can be a segment of society, like the homeless community, or a group with shared interests, like the software development community. If you think about community as a series of interconnected circles, with what’s in a circle is community and what’s outside a circle is not community, you start to build a fairly interesting picture of how communities can be defined and how they might even share multiple characteristics. Potential overlaps between communities introduce interesting twists on the power of such combinations.”

Our ‘Green Industry’ is such a circle. It includes participants from the plant breeder down to the end user, or customer; from trade publications such as TGC to industry events such as trade shows. Retail garden centers and wholesale growers are entities within themselves that orbit like satellites around the core community. Just as the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, our industry is only as strong as our ability to organize ourselves as a community.

The challenge is the physical distance that separates us, while the opportunity is the technology that can connect us. Social networking takes shape in communities connected by mega-sites like ‘Facebook’ and ‘MySpace’, while networks like Plaxo or Linkedn have sprung up to connect small business. Recently the publishers of TGC, Greenhouse Grower and Ornamental Outlook launched the Fresh Air Forum, a site dedicated to greenhouse growers, wholesale growers and garden center owners.

While it is easy to join such groups, it is the participation of the members that generates the value. Just as with any new idea, or in this case a Green Industry networking site, the first to join are those industry pioneers who are drawn to innovation. It will take time for this network to develop, but it is essential for the strength and viability of the Independent Garden Center that it does grow.

Typically, most independent garden center owners operate in a bubble. Even with industry trade publications and visits to regional trade shows the flow of information is slow. Information and ideas these days moves at breathtaking speeds. These days by the time national, and even international news hits the airwaves it is out of date. News is updated on sites like CNN.com and organized by how many minutes ago it was published. Whether we like it or not it is only going to get faster.

While the shear speed of the technology is daunting, those businesses that are able to adapt will succeed. It is not just the function of joining, but rather those companies that are able to and understand and leverage the technology that will succeed. I will stop just short of saying it is imperative that you and your business get up to speed, but those that do stand to benefit the most.

Let’s put it in practical terms. As this article goes to publication the most recent Time magazine (December 8, 2008) did a feature on going green. The Life section did a feature on buying a live Christmas tree and then planting it. Good news for the local garden center. The opportunity would be to merge the community of readers of Time magazine with the community of customers to your business and then connect the dots. You could send out an e-mail update on the article while providing links to the virtual article on time.com, or you could quickly post a blog entry that would be published distributed through to all of your customers.

That is of course if you have bothered to actually compile a listing of all of your customers.

You can find a more interactive account of the process in a blog I posted on the subject while composing this article. Confusing as that all might be the point is that you can take advantage of marketing opportunities if you are willing to commit yourself and your company to a new way to market your business.

Don’t get me wrong, an online, or interactive approach will never really replace your current marketing efforts (eventually it might), but rather it will help to focus and amplify your message. The irony is that you still need to master the basics of business before you can be truly effective at the cutting edge.

You see a community does not happen by accident. It comes together by the sharing of ideas. It comes together by friends or colleagues introducing themselves to others. It comes together by finding mutual interests and a desire to grow through shared self-interest.

Individually we might find the answers and opportunities to the challenges that face small business these days, but collectively we will succeed. Through the interaction of sharing both problems and solutions with sites like freshairforum.com no business will be left to sink or swim on it’s own.