Davey Shafik, a developer advocate at Akamai, has shared some of his own thoughts and perspective on his site about building a community presence for your company and help it "do community".

Your company has decided it needs to “do community”, whatever that means, you’re community manager 1 number one, what now? From my time as a developer advocate/evangelist under both marketing and engineering teams, I have come to some conclusions about how to build community presence. Though my experience is mostly with technical communities, this should apply pretty well to any community building.

He breaks it up into three man sections, filling each in with some background and concrete suggestions you can use to help get the ball rolling:

• Identify Your Products Potential Audience(s)
• Breadth First Evangelism
• Depth First Evangelism
• Localized Evangelism

He ends the post by reminding you that, while these suggestions can help you "get your foot in the door". He'll be following this post up with another providing more about how you can use the feedback you get to enhance and improve your efforts.