The “Community Question” haunts almost all companies with an online presence, and shapes both our day-to-day and strategic approaches to eventual success. Furthermore, there’s no doubt that online communities are the life-blood of today’s ecommerce sites–eBay, Amazon, and Lulu (where I work) depend on their communities for feedback, return traffic, repeat business, site stickiness, viral marketing and brand reinforcement. Your community is your strongest asset and staunchest ally. Be kind to your community because, in truth, it’s not your community. They own you, and will quickly turn on you if you slight them.

But, for better or worse, your online business definitely should have a community around it (see where community ranks in “Top 10 Things To Do As a Startup“) . A strong, dynamic, and exciting community is a significant competitive advantage and serves as a barrier to entry for others trying to gain traction in your space–especially in new markets.

On the other hand, building a successful enterprise requires focusing on your core strengths, i.e. those specific efforts that will deliver superior products or services for your market. Unless you’re like Flickr or YouTube–that is, depending on ad revenue or social network effects–your core strengths will not be community technology. As a matter of fact, companies (large or small) can easily get distracted by spending development cycles on important, yet non-critical, community platforms and infrastructure.

Avoid the temptation. There’s no need for you to build a better blog, a better profile management system, a better photo arranger, or a better widget. Why? For one, you’ll always be behind the curve because this isn’t your space. You didn’t hire your engineers to be experts in this field, and they’re not. Two, you’ll never know which one of the top 20 widget functionalities you’ll need–which will add the most value, and there’s a good chance you’ll pick the wrong one. Three, by the time you pick one to work on, and even if it is the right one, before you deploy it there will be 20 more newer cool applications to emulate. You’ll get distracted. In essence, you’ll catch yourself looking at every pretty girl (or every cool community app) that walks by while your competitors are focusing on the “one thing” (whatever that is) that brings success in your market.

So what’s a company to do to take advantage of the community phenomenon?

There are two paths, actually.

* Subcontract the development: If you can’t avoid the NIH (“If it’s Not Invented Here we won’t use it”) approach and decide to build your own community tools, then subcontract these efforts through an external engineering house to meet your specs. But don’t spend your key development resources on this project.

* Buy, Rent or Join “off the shelf” community platforms: This option was the primary reason for writing this post to begin with, but I caught myself needing to post the preamble above. But recently there have been several compelling “community in a box” hosted applications that have caught my attention–namely Ning, Flux, and Wetpaint, which I’ve been investigating. At this point each deserves it’s own separate post, so we’ll start with Ning tomorrow.