Over the weekend I attended a few sessions at Podcamp Singapore and the Digital Media Festival. The one thing that struck me the most was the idea of going where the people are.

At DM Fest, the topic came up when I was talking to someone just after a session about communities. I was asking his opinion about whether it made more sense to use your own logins if you’re trying to build a community, or to try and leverage technologies like OpenID so people can use other accounts to join. The answer was a pretty obvious one.

At Podcamp Singapore, the topic came up in both the sessions I attended. Coleman talked about choosing the right medium – text, audio or video. As you can imagine, one of the main factors discussed was about audience preference.

The other session I attended was by Amsie from Curious Foodie, who shared her journey on blogging. During the session, the discussion went on a very nice (in my opinion) tangent when the owner of fourcardflush, a poker blog, asked for advice on how to build the local online poker community – the poker community in Singapore is largely unseen online. The suggestions? To go out into the offline community, take part in the games, and build from there.

3 very different sessions, with different focuses and applications. But the common general theme is quite prevalent.

The easiest way to build a community is to go where the people are. Don’t just try to pull them to where you are. Go to where they are, join them, and build relationships first. Then do you thing, and they will follow.