This is not about the online professional community business model, rather, it is about distilling people’s participation in those communities down to the economic terms most of us live by. It is also about why these communities are taking off and why you should look at this rapidly developing resource.

Many people question the utility of online professional communities. How can they save me any time? Don’t I have to spend just as much time helping others as they spend helping me? What’s efficient about that? I might as well be doing what I do today, spending hours, days or weeks looking for answers to my questions via Google, emails and phone calls to friends or corporate counsel, my auditor, etc. It’s expensive and inefficient, and it doesn’t always get the job done, but at least it’s familiar.

If this were truly the case, online communities would never work. But they do, and here’s why…

If I have an issue and am looking for an answer, it may take me hours, days, weeks or longer to gain the knowledge I seek. However, if I know the answer to someone else’s question, it only takes me minutes to type out the answer for them. One person helping and one person helped. One person spending minutes, another person saving hours or more. The economics, therefore, demonstrate that for minutes invested, hours and more are saved – consistently. Which is why these communities thrive.

In fact, the economic efficiencies are far more dramatic in a community than in a traditional in-person information exchange. In a community, one person providing an answer to another person’s question does not solely assist the person asking the question, it helps everyone paying attention in the community. Those who don’t care or already know the answer don’t invest any time. Everyone else who wants to learn, however, will be saving the same minutes, hours, days or weeks as the requester, but at a later point in time when they find they need that knowledge.

Likewise, people who come to the party later, looking for an answer to the same question, are able to save the same amount of time as the original questioner. Only now it is 100% pure return because the answer is already there in a searchable archive. Nobody has to put forth fresh effort for this later beneficiary. Let’s face it, most professionals spend a lot of time in on-the-job training, working to recreate that which has been done countless times before in our own or at other companies. Online professional communities provide a solution to our continually reinventing the wheel.

I find an analogy in something Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, and later de Tocqueville expressed as “self-interest rightly understood”. That is, by participating in an online community I can “selfishly” save hours while only putting in minutes. A similar parallel can be drawn to the economic theory of comparative advantage: you and I both know unique things that we have learned through years in business, and sharing those things is far easier for us to do than it would be to spend the time learning them anew.

It almost seems wrong to put in so little and get so much in return. But it works.