Community Building: 6 Things You’re Getting Wrong
- Community Management is NOT the same as Community Building
To manage a community, you need to first build a community.
Community Building is about getting an initial set of founding community members who are vocal about your cause and highly interested in your project. In some cases, they are crowd pullers.
Community Management is about designing a Community Experience (CX). Right from onboarding, to setting ground rules, to engaging a new members in their first conversation, to defining & managing roles, to kicking people out of the community.
Both these activities require a different skill set.
Contrary to popular belief, if you build it, they won’t come. There are 100s of projects being built everyday. There’s so many avenues to spend attention.
Answer this: What’s the incentive for them to join your community?
2. Having an Audience ≠ Having a Community
Good example of an audience is a newsletter list. They’re listeners of conversations that are typically produced by a centralized source.
Good example of a community is the WallStreetBets subreddit. The members of this community collaborate, participate, and initiate conversations.
3. Community-product Fit over Product-market Fit
Gone are the days where building a product was the starting point.
Today, you start with a community. Even if you run a small discord server with 500 members, you have a starting point.
Run your product ideas with your community before building them.
Have the customers ready before you write the first line of code.
4. I need to define a purpose for my community
Lol, no. You don’t define the purpose of your community. That’s not how a community works. Your community defines the purpose of your community. You may start with a vision, but your community needs to take it forward and iterate on it.
Think of yourself or your company as a platform provider, an enabler, a facilitator of conversations. No the executor.
Over time, your community will make the purpose of your community loud and clear, that will then organically attract similar members.
5. All community members should be treated as equals
Wrong. As per the 90–9–1 rule, approximately 90% of your community will be lurkers, 9% will be conversation contributors, and 1% will be conversation starters.
Another way to visualize this is the Orbit model, especially for technology focused communities. Your community, at any given point, will be composed of explorers, participators, contributors, and builders in the order of size.
In both cases, the community members will switch from one sub-group to another at different points in time.
It is important to recognize this, and treat each group differently. Which brings me to my last point.
6. I can run a community with $0
Wrong again. Most communities have what I call “super members” or “community leaders”. They’re the rockstars of your community. They lead conversations, teach others, evangelize, invest a lot of time, and have fun in the community. Not because of financial incentives, inspite of it.
But that doesn’t mean you leave them alone and don’t invest in them.
There’s a good example of how auth0 identified a few community leaders, trained them in public speaking, and flew them around to major conferences in front of thousands of developers representing auth0.
Once you find these rockstar community members, do everything in your power to treat them like first class citizens. Invest in them, train them, recognize their efforts, reward them.
A community that vibes with your project can take your project to places where no sales team or BD team can take it.
Authored by: Kamal Laungani
Twitter: https://twitter.com/launganik
