Talking Communities of Practice at Advocamp
This week the fine folks at Influitive are putting on their event about customer experience, engagement and advocacy at this year’s Advocamp in San Francisco. I’ll be speaking on Thursday. I’ve noticed the content and buzz in years past, but this will be my first year, and I’m really looking forward to it.
Influitive (and Advocamp) are associated with “customer advocacy.” but curiously, I’m not going to talk about customers.
So… I’m not going to talk about customers at a customer advocacy conference? Nope. Instead, I’m going to talk about the communities that bind together customers, partners, employees, and other enthusiasts.
Communities of Practice come together around an activity or topic and as they interact, they learn and support each other and they get better at it. The best, most compelling products accrete this kind of community around them.
Communities of practice are powerful because they develop a shared repertoire — a set of shared resources and outputs they use to do and learn about their thing. Communites of practice around tech create all sorts of content and tools that help users do their thing — tutorials, demos, how-tos, troubleshooting, Q&As, scripts, add-ons, utilities, latest updates, and more.
Communities of practice around a product are advocates for the product, but they don’t just tell you how they like the product — they show you by creating all these cool tools and content. This is like advocacy on steroids.
Communities are powerful sources of identity and emotional connection. In communities around tech, often that identity as a community member transcends your identity as an employee. So, yes, there are customers in that community. But there are also resellers and and consultants and employees and other people who have, in many cases, bet their careers on your product.
So let’s bring it all back to advocacy. Normally companies don’t think partners can be effective advocates — after all, a reseller or consultant has a vested interest in telling you the product is good. But as a part of a community of practice, partners make awesome advocates.
I’ll also talk about how to create a program to foster that community of practice and turn it into an engine for advocacy (or a factory that creates new advocates — I can never stop with one metaphor!). And I’ll share a few examples from HPE, Qlik, and VMware. I’ll come back with the slides and full talk after the conference, but I’ll leave you with this for now:
If you’re attending Advocamp this week in SF, please reach out Thursday and say hi! I’d love to meet you. I’m @jtroyer on Twitter or jtroyer@techreckoning.com.
