You need to be in your community and letting everyone know what you and your business do. Find ways to help others and help them. Find out what your online community is. Are you in any yahoo groups relevant to what you do? Are you on twitter and facebook and linkedin? This is YOUR community – where you can make a real difference. Are you doing so?

If you are an expert in personal branding online, this might seem like old-hat to you, but community management isn’t about large corporations that need people to facilitate connections. It is a mindset that can be useful for nearly every size of business.

Some of the best businesses in the world became the best thanks to how they managed and served their community, and thus their customers.

For me, one of my favourite stories with regards to community management, and how it helped a business succeed, is a computer store in Kingston, Ontario Canada called Kingston Computer Planet or KCP as it is better known.

Kingston was already filled to the brim with computer stores, but a few guys got together and wanted to create a computer store that was more than just a place to pick up hardware, and in doing so, KCP became one of the best computer and technology communities in Kingston, which has helped their business stay afloat, and even expand in a super-saturated market.

Without their interest in building and managing a community, I doubt they would have been as successful as they are today with a forum community now approaching nearly 100,000 posts and 12,000 members.

Have you thought like a Community Manager today?