Community as a Service (CaaS)
Communities.. they come in all shapes, sizes and walks of life. The need for community seems to be embedded into our DNA. It’s because communities, in any way, shape or form offer us something valuable.
And in the business world things are not much different.
Community Provides
“Vires in Numerus” (Strenght in Numbers)
We can not underestimate the great benefits that community has for it’s participants in many different contexts. Benefits that, by now have been widely researched and documented. Communities have a variety of functions and value propositions (for all people involved):
It provides Connections (people to people and people to ideas), Inspiration, Motivation, Resources (pertaining to information & education and pertaining to community skills), Influence and Support.
By immersing yourself in a community, you also give yourself a chance to learn from the overall group, mining the wisdom of several people and helping each other out along the way. A community identifies with common values, goals and interests.
But why do brands create branded communities?
Whilst the majority of retail brands are seeking people to buy from them, the community-minded brand invites people to buy into their brand.
Many brands have now come to realise that communities can serve their purposes in a variety of ways. At the core of this sits the realisation that they don’t have to provide all services top-down to their customers or potential customers, but through a community can empower users to support users (amongst other things).
So besides users supporting users, a branded community can share many functions and offer value to it’s participants in a variety of ways. Here are some common functions and value propositions of branded communities (as Fabian Pfortmüller also pointed out):
Distributed customer service: Does this reduce the number of customer service tickets, because customers will answer each other’s questions? For example: the Apple support forum (“Find answers, ask questions, and connect with our community of Apple users from around the world”).
Knowledge sharing of super users: Are customers sharing their experiences and best practice with other customers, therefore creating a richer brand experience for them? For example: the AirBnB host community (“The Community Centre is a place to connect with other hosts, share stories, ask for advice, and get updates from the Airbnb team. You can also plan or join meet-ups”).
Distributed content generation: Are customers going to actively contribute content to the platform provided by the company? Example: people translating and creating new language course in DuoLingo (See CMX: “Here is Duolingo’s Playbook for Creating Community-Generated Content for over 50 Million Learners”).
Shared product experience: Are customers using the product together with other customers, therefore creating a shared experience? For example: Nike+ Run Club (“At Nike+ Run Club Live Sessions, you’ll find encouragement, guidance, and a local crew of like-minded runners”).
Brand loyalty and retention: There is an assumption that many of these different types of brand communities share: that a strong brand community will lead to increased brand loyalty and customer retention. Intuitively this makes sense, but how exactly community engagement turns into brand loyalty, I haven’t really understood. A quick glance at some academic research points to some evidence that trust within the community leads to higher commitment and affinity, which in turn leads to more loyal behaviour towards the brand: “brand community commitment was found to play a mediating role in the relationships between brand community trust/affect and brand loyalty” (Via Emerald Insight).
Product innovation through community input: Are customers providing feedback on existing products or submitting new ideas? Example: Lego Ideas, an initiative by the toymaker where users can support, submit and discover ideas for new LEGO sets.
So building and nurturing a branded community has unmistakably become a integral part of any brand strategy that seeks to both grow their business and retain loyal customers.
And, in many ways, community forms the distributed foundation on which any company can build their success.
But how much community does your firm need to thrive? How much would you pay for that? Could that be something you’d simply outsource like many other business components? Can “community” be a subscription service?
Short answer: Yes, I believe it most certainly can (more on that later).
Technological progress has changed much if not all of how we interact with each other. As a result it has also changed how and where we form communities.
Let me shine a light on some influencing factors that are opening up a wider space for Community as a Service.
Flooded
We find ourselves in exponential times. As pointed out by Visual Capitalist, technologic progress is accelerating. Which has its upsides..
New products can now achieve millions of users in just months.
But there are also challenges..
As technological progress accelerates, so does the amount of information that comes at us daily. An interconnected world through high-speed internet combined with exponential technological advances means information is shared and accessible instantly. The stream of information never ends. More so for many company executives. There are an increasing amount of new technologies and ways of working a company needs to consider or adopt to in order to secure their growth. Blockchain, AI, Big Data etc.
Do you become a data-first company or not, does your company even have a proper digital strategy, should you look into and adopt blockchain or AI, how to grow and nurture your community? Combine this with a constant stream of information that keeps coming 24/7 straight into our phone or computer screen.
That is a lot coming at us…and sometimes it can flood us. Companies…executives…. people want a filter. They want to filter between the relevant and irrelevant so they save time and cost and focus their efforts on the 20% that gives them 80% of the results (for those of you that follow the Pareto Principle).
Disaggregated Times
The smallest viable unit that one can base a business on is becoming smaller. Computer mainframe companies disaggregated into companies that make software and companies that made PC’s. That further disaggregated into companies that make apps, companies that make operating systems and companies that produce micro chips. And over the recent years we’ve seen further disaggregation of apps being broken down into their API components and now those API components are being offered as a product or service.
These kind of developments have nurtured a business environment where companies can pick and choose these disaggregated components and re-aggregate them into what they need (and want) to build and run their business. That also allows them to save time and recourses and allocate that towards their core products or services (specialisation). We are seeing an increase in this type of outsourcing. And we have more choices for these type of solutions as well, more than ever.
There is a good reason why we have seen such a growth into further disaggregation of business solutions and services. Think about Stripe enabling payments solutions for businesses without having to build it themselves. The future is becoming more disaggregated and outsourcing anything that is not your core product is has become commonplace. The components that help build and run your business are increasingly compiled from other smaller units of business to enable companies to pick and choose their technology stack & services so they can hone in on their 20% that produces 80% of the results.
Community as a Part of Your Stack
For those who don’t know: Stack is a term that is used mostly to describe a collection of different solutions. More specifically in this case: a collection of different pieces of software (or other tech solutions) that enable a business to operate and also save time and costs when these pieces of software are outsourced versus the company having to build it themselves (more in depth here). Take a look at any company’s tech stack list and you’ll see products and services that are built by other companies but enable any company to leverage them for their business. Amazon AWS, Yandex Metrica, Wix, Google Analytics, Wordpress, Mimecast to name a few. Every company want’s to outsource what they can in order to gain efficiency and focus on their core product and their customers.
This has become the norm for tech solutions and although stack usually refers to software/tech solutions and services, I believe any outsourced product or service is essentially a part of your company’s stack wether software or outsourced human capital.
So not only tech based products and services, but also human capital and soft skill areas (like HR outsourcing, marketing etc) are seeing a trend towards further disaggregation and become available for any company to outsource. I firmly believe we’ll also see a large growth in this area with regards to Community as a Service (CaaS).
Arguably CaaS is also based largely around tech solutions. There is no getting around that of course, nor should we want to because it’s highly enabling and accessible. Technology helps to create communities in new ways and helps toto bring all the people and ideas together in one place. It makes it easier for people to find each other, be informed and share (more on the hows in another article).
But meaningful conversations, support, sharing knowledge and experiences… These are all human inputs that create the true value within a community.
Community Needs
Companies often have educational pieces about their products and solutions. And, whilst seeming logical and clearly laid out to them it often requires some translation and distilling down into a format or aggregated piece that is more easily consumed and taken in by community members. Such a need becomes apparent by looking at the high view rates of 3rd party explainer articles and or video’s titled ‘What is’ or ‘Taking a closer look at’. Or, all the Reddit articles where the ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) tag is so prevalent.
This need exists in all branches but is amplified greatly in new branches around complex and multi faceted services and products (prevalent in blockchain but also something like AWS).
But community members do not only care about being informed and educated properly. They care about value. They also care about getting that value in the most simple, accessible manner they can. They don’t wan’t to jump through all kinds of hoops and join 4 to 8 different platforms and fill out forms just to get their questions answered and to connect with like minded people.
By now it has been well documented that community commitment increases brand loyalty. So community, in that sense, becomes a vital part of any brand’s market strategy. None less vital then say, their sales strategy.
Community commitment is strongly tied to the value that it’s members are able to derive from the community. This community can be consumer-initiated or company-initiated. In both cases value is derived from the usefulness it offers to it’s members. That is determined by the quality of information, the quality of the system it’s presented in (it should be simple!), the rewards/or value derived from the community by it’s members (that can be content and interactions), the interaction that takes place amongst community members and between brand and the community.
In these days of hyper-connectedness and personal branding, individuals and communities have become more accustomed to and crave a more direct and open approach from their brands. Like the experience in following their personal Youtube favourites, it gives them more to identify and connect with. Not just the product or services of a brand, but also the people behind the brand. They want a more personal relationship with their brand. Most of recent technological developments have not only created the ability to do so, but have also created a demand for it.
I firmly believe that businesses will have to adopt to an increasingly ‘open’ strategy when it comes to community.
In a lot of blockchain start-ups people have started to wake up to this growing need and those companies have open and easy to access communities on platforms like Telegram or Reddit.
However, many, many companies (especially non-tech companies) out there are using opaque and convoluted ways to tend to their communities (if at all)
They can all greatly benefit from simplifying and outsourcing community.
Open and personal are key operative words in in doing business in these days. Partly enabled and emphasised by technological advances, but they originate from basic human needs to interact and form relations. Technology simply amplifies this. And recent technological developments allows us far greater and easier access to these human to human interactions. To form communities (if we allow for that). We can connect, discuss, teach, share… all from a device that we already carry with us at all times..
I can tell you from experience that a community that is informed and educated, a community that feels listened to & shared with is a community that is engaged, productive and tends to feel connected to the brand. It provides them with something valuable (provided of-course that, next to a valuable community the products and services of said brand offers them something valuable as well).
By now it should be quite unnecessary to reiterate the importance of community for any brand. But should the brand be the one delivering all that is involved with community building? Remember: community building is not just about simply getting a vast amount of members to your channel. It’s about connecting the brand with the community. Inspiring engagement, motivating, connecting people to people, provide resources, support, storytelling & sharing through education and conversation.
Surely your team has a lot on their plate already and you’d much prefer a simple solution you can outsource instead of having to get a team of professionals on your payroll or build out your marketing team to properly accommodate for it.
Let’s reiterate those questions from the beginning of this article: “How much community does your firm need to thrive? How much would you pay for that? Could that be something you’d simply outsource like many other business components? Can “community” be a subscription service?”
How would you answer those questions now? Not sure yet?
Let me take you along the path I have walked and the insights it provided me. It lead me to build a product. A product that provides exactly that one enabling community solution. It’s a Community as a Service-based product and it will enable any company to outsource community and “add it to their stack” much like you would a software as a service or any tech service like SalesForce or AWS for instance…
Read on here
For an executive summary of Melt, make sure you visit the Melt LinkedIn page and drop me a message to say hi and ask me any questions you may have.
