What I talk about when I talk about community
My business cards arrived and now I’m wondering if I got it all wrong.
I made an assessment of my career, my experiences, and what I believe in, and I chose a phrase that I felt I wanted to put at the centre of my newly evolving business.
“Create communities around the things you care about.”
Then I had a conversation with janeruffino about how difficult it is to explain what we do, and how to get across the value and meaning of community building and content creation.
Afterwards, I looked at my business cards thinking… s**t, I might have just made one of the most basic marketing mistakes.
I didn’t put myself into the shoes of my target audience.
This might be what I believe I’m about, but how many people will share my understanding of what’s involved in building communities? Do I have to start all over again and print new business cards? To find out, let’s look at what I talk about when I talk about community.
Here is what people usually think when they hear “community building”:
Social media, Facebook pages, followers on Twitter, viral videos…
Here is what I think when I hear “community building”:
(Brand) identity, conversations, user experience, solving problems, answering questions, building relationships, telling stories. Get people excited about my product, give them a reason to talk about me.
In a second step, I also think about channels I can use to have those conversations and build that identity. And in some cases I think Facebook or Twitter.
So In reality, what do I think it actually takes to build a community?
I think you need three mindsets focused on people, content and authenticity respectively.
1. The people-focused mindset
With a focus on growing your “customer base”, your “conversions”, “churn”, the number of your “Facebook followers” and other impersonal metrics, you easily fall into the trap of taking a perspective removed from people and your actual purpose.
I like this slightly changed version of the Golden Circle by Lex Sisney to understand how a more human-centered approach plays out.
Focusing your mind on “I’m building a community” forces you to do your homework on defining your business values starting with the who, before the why, the how and the what.
In this version, you actually start in the very middle with the very people you’re trying to serve.
The why is not so much about you now, but about your target audience. We have to put ourselves into the shoes of our customers. What are their pain points? What gets them excited?
Every piece of your business - your product, your services, the way you hire new people - just takes you back to the center of your Golden Circle. And, most importantly, you therefore prioritize tasks that are of value for the people at the heart of your business, over others that just serve a growth agenda focused on impersonal metrics.
2. The content-focused mindset
Communication is at the heart of building relationships. Relationships are at the heart of building communities.
In our products we communicate to people all the time through content. On the product packaging, on our website, on a log-in screen. Yet, content is often just the last piece, quickly added at the end, after the wireframes are signed off.
When your developers start thinking about building relationships instead of making people click to get the conversion metrics, content has to become part of the design process and a content manager or copy writer becomes part of your product team.
The chart below from Intercom demonstrates that in a very eye-opening way, giving words the same space as code or design for software products. It’s a simple visualization, yet so powerful for our day-to-day work.
3. The authenticity-focused mindset
How do you usually make new friends?
a) By pretending to be twice as successful as you are and talking just about yourself all the time.
b) By being yourself and showing interest in another person.
Though for ourselves the answer is of course option b, when it comes to our products we often go for option a. We try to be an expert on something we are not, we try to sell people something by holding it in front of their faces while talking about how thousands of other people bought it before them. Sometimes we even make things up.
With our monthly growth metrics on a big screen in front of us it’s so easy to start pretending and aggressively selling. Maybe, with the faces and stories of the people in our community up on the wall in front of us, not so much. Whatever the piece of content is I write, I always find it helpful to imagine sending it to a specific person.
The question is how we interact with that person and, depending on the product, how we allow people to interact with each other.
It is time to get serious about community building
Don’t get me wrong, I love metrics and measuring the impact of what I do, but they are only a part of the story. They can often lead us to prioritize growth over the people we initially wanted to help.
To avoid that, we need to start creating communities around the things we care about. We need to focus on people, content and authenticity. If we do that we will build products, businesses and work places that are more honest, more human and more sustainable. That’s what I talk about when I talk about community.
Oh, and that business card?
I think it’s perfect.
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If you’d like my help building a community around something you care about, come and talk to me on Twitter.
