Building meaningful connections is still broken
I am very close to deleting my LinkedIn profile, and I know I am not alone. This is an ironic turn of events, given that what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is building a real community through real connections. Isn’t that the point of LinkedIn? Well, like many others, I’ve been bombarded with so-called ‘connection’ requests, but there’s no real connection. And that’s exactly the crux of the problem, not only with LinkedIn but with community building in general. ‘Connection’ only in name and not in the experience.
We at Giant Swarm have actively and conscientiously tried to rebel against this by contributing to our community through peer-to-peer engagements and events such as Giant Swarm & Friends. The name of the event we hope serves as a signpost of our intentions and a reminder to ourselves: a gathering of friends. As simple as that.
However, it’s not simple. We have to constantly be on the lookout for the traps of ‘good’ marketing. We don’t want to be good at marketing, or more specifically broadly targeted marketing speak, we don’t have to be. We want to be good at sharing what we do and connecting with our community in service of their interests, not ours.
The truth is that my intentions will always clash against reality — to maintain any connection that is real requires work, but how do I scale this when I aim to develop and maintain not just a handful of connections but upwards of 200? At the end of the day, Giant Swarm is a conduit for connection but not the connection itself.
People want to talk to people, and people build relationships with people and not with companies. This is not done in a one-dimensional way around one subject, e.g., Kubernetes. Instead, we are all multi-faceted, and we as a company need to enable conversations amongst individuals inside and outside Giant Swarm with the right facets. This means we must experiment, expand, and be creative, but it also invariably means we must make mistakes. After all, what is a more human and real experience than making a mistake? What do mistakes look like? Maybe, I should point out what they don’t look like. People vehemently disagreeing with us is a feature, not a bug, because it means we’re trying something. I would rather that than inspire no feelings at all. Inside Giant Swarm, we encourage honest conversations that sometimes get tough.
I’m inspired by our mission: to help companies innovate. We believe Kubernetes is currently one of the best ways to enable innovation, and so we have made ourselves Kubernetes experts to serve our community. We want to build a community because we believe that’s the best way to be generous with what we’ve learned and greedy for what we still need to learn. The bigger the community, the more everyone benefits. This is the same reasoning that led us to ensure we have one product and not individual solutions on a per-customer basis, as everyone gains by fixing a problem experienced in the real-world working with one customer.
There is a lot more to say, but this is why this is a series, and I will be continuing on a biweekly basis. I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I mentioned here — but maybe don’t message me on LinkedIn; I might not be there much longer.
