How to build a online community that is more than just the sum of its numbers?

That’s the quandary facing so many companies and brands as they try and make sense of what value or benefit they can take from the 200,000 Facebook fans or half a million Twitter followers who have clicked a button of support.

So it was with the aim of gaining some enlightenment on community and movement building that I attended the third annual Alliance for Youth Movement (AYM) Summit, currently being held in London.

AYM describes itself as a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting, connecting, and supporting digital activists from around the world. The London summit gathered together some of the smartest digital activists and movement builders promoting peace and democracy from the Middle East to Colombia and beyond. And its keynote speaker was Joe Rospars, the digital campaign brain behind the Barack Obama presidential campaign and founder of Blue State Digital.

Of course in some ways I had sent myself on a bit of a fool’s errand. After all no-one would argue that online fans of Coca-Cola would be as passionate about that brand as peace activists would be for halting the Middle East conflict, (would they?) And while every marketing manager has been demanding that agencies capture the “Obama effect” since Rospars’ digital grassroots campaign swept Obama into the White House, few believe that any company could ever tap into the passion for change and then network and enable it with the efficiency of the ’08 campaign.

Yet spending an afternoon listening to smart young digitally savvy people compare notes on the best practice of building digital networks the challenges these NGOs face are not dissimilar to the dilemma faced by most of Fortune 500 companies that are attempting to build a genuine social media relationship with their customers and employees.

Central to that dilemma are two key issues: First, how to employ the new social tools so that community can better connect and build together. Second, how to measure the success of a movement beyond counting the numbers.

Rospars highlighted how technology and data mining needs to be employed in subtle and social manner if it is to motivate and mobilize. He highlighted how the Obama campaign had been able, through grassroots community data gathering, to take a hyperlocal approach to voter registration by giving activists accurate data on Obama supporters in their neighborhoods who could be asked to vote. And he stressed how treating voters as real people not names on a list was the first, respectful, stage of running an email or text campaign. How many direct marketers could benefit from taking that advice?

Then there was what we might call the million member question: Is there a best practice guide to building an online movement asked Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net during one session titled “Turning Social Networks into Real Community.” He and other participants of course realize the massive potential of mobilizing through social networks yet they bemoaned how social media has exacerbated so-called slacktivism (where it’s easy to support a good cause by becoming a Facebook fan and then do nothing tangible to follow through that commitment).

For big brands, harnessing social networks offer similar tantalizing, mobilizing rewards in terms of learning from customer experiences and opinions, yet social media and brand managers across the land ask themselves the same questions as Banks as they evaluate what those Facebook fan stats really mean. At least the brands can run competitions and give away free stuff in a way to build “customer loyalty”. Though if your best way of winning “friends” is to keep giving them gifts them maybe they’re not as loyal as you’d hope them to be!

The truth is that, whether it be in business or social change, everyone is experimenting with how best to build upon social capital and no-one yet has all the answers. But as these two seemingly polarized and often antagonistic sectors seek to navigate a disruptive media landscape that puts human interaction to the fore, the methods and strategy they use to attract new customers and build social movements may end up being very similar.