Out of all the sessions at the Blog Business Summit, the session on building online communities held a special place of interest for me. In many ways, I simply happened upon the community that I’ve built at RCG, so it was refreshing to hear the speakers articulating thoughts I’ve had on how to build a community. In many ways, building a community feels somewhat intuitive (i.e. respect your users), but it turns out that the details often lead to tricky minefields. In many ways, this lesson highlighted just how far behind the real estate sphere is in creating effective online communities.

The three panelists, Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt, Betsy Aoki, have all spent time on the front lines dealing with the good and bad of building up an online community.

Tara Hunt’s background includes running the grassroots marketing of Riya, which launched with a tremendous amount of buzz. On a high level, here are some high level tips for building a community:

• Let customers “win