How to create engaged communities with dark social and collaboration tools
“If your community can provide a legitimate release valve for people’s incredibly frustrated passion, you are unleashing one of the most potent forces in the history of the world” — Peter H. Diamandis
Can a community be more valuable than money?
Besides its customers pool, an engaged community can definitely give some extra benefits. For example, a community of passionate developers can create great open source software, for free. Moreover, having all your users interacting in place only, can facilitate social listening, leading to valuable customers insights.
How can I build an engaged community? Which are the best tools? Should I spend money to build it?
From traditional social network, through dark social, to social collaboration tools, I will show how a community can start, grow and develop, without spending a single penny.
Social network
When we talk about social network, we refer to big open communities like Facebook and Instagram. Everyone knows about them. Social Networks like Facebook are a huge pool of people, good to share articles or experiences with everyone we know, but the lack of clear identity makes them not appropriate to engage in some sort of specific action. Similarly to how Facebook originally started by connecting people from College, people tend to join a community to reinforce their sense of identity. As Richard Millington says, “The bigger a community gets, the less people participate.” That is why we now see a growing trend of closed social communities, which are “closed” or “private” groups that allow discussion in a discreet ‘members only’ area.This popularity is primarily driven by privacy issues and information overload in open social networks and is being reinforced by the members of Gen Z, who grew up with the internet as part of their everyday routine and are aware of the dangers of overexposing themselves online.
Closed Social Networks is not the only answer. “group chats are the new social network” — Greg Isenberg, founder of Islands.
Dark Social
Every time we share content through IM, email, messaging apps or other private channels, we are using the “dark social”. A typical example is a copy-pasted link into email or WhatsApp message.
Why dark?
It is “dark” because, in contrast to traditional social network, this exchange of information is not fully transparent: the links we share do not contain referral data. Referral data is defined by the tags attached to the link we want to share. For example, when we use the option “Share on Facebook”, a new link, different from the original page URL, is generated in an action window. The referral tags are reported at the and of that link. On the contrary, when we manually copy and paste a link into a chat, those tracking tags are lost.
How important is dark social?
As shown in the chart below, 84% of shares is attributed to Dark Social, 9% by Facebook and 7% by all the other public social networks.
Why is Dark Social so dominant?
The feeling of belonging to a specific group, give people a higher sense of identity. However, the reason why people stay is the conversation they have with each other.
Assuming the concepts above are correct, what is the best way to have a conversation, if not within restricted chat groups? I believe trust plays an important role when deciding what to share and where to do it. Moreover, trust is definitely stronger in small protected groups rather than big ones.
Would you be more likely to share something in a smaller or bigger group of people?
Among group chat applications, I suggest to take a look at Telegram and Signal, two free and open source messaging app. Telegram not only allows to create groups and channels, but also chat-bots. In fact, thanks to Telegram’s Botfather, building a chat-bot has become accessible to everyone, without requiring having a proper programming background.
Social collaboration tools: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose
Social collaboration refers to processes that help multiple people or groups interact and share information to achieve common goals. (Wikipedia)
Team collaboration tools, similar to Slack, are recently being used to gather people with similar interests and build small but engaged communities. A FREE and more versatile version of Slack is Discord.
Discord was originally born as a gaming chat, and is now being used by several groups of developers as a platform where to work on open source software, among other examples. Not only developers, anyone can now be part of the conversations, by means of multi channel functionality. In this way, users seeking for help or technical support, are now all on the same platform. This is why clearly takes the lean startup and customer centrist approach to the next level: Developers, users, owners etc., sharing one unique and common interest, can interact with each other on the same platform.
This is a great way to shorten the distance between difference functionalities
Why should people be motivated to contribute in the development of a product, if they are not payed?
One could answer that passion for a common cause is the most powerful ingredient for collaboration. I would like to mention Dan Pink, who tell us that motivation does not come from Reward, but from Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Social collaboration tools have all the characteristics to give users all three:
- Autonomy: Within a social collaboration group there is no fixed schedule. Each user is free to collaborate when, where and how he or she wants. There is no contract or deal as well that regulate the amount of interaction. Each user is completely autonomous in his contribution, and self-directed.
- Mastery: Being independent but part of a common project, various responsibility can be assigned to each user, avoiding overlapping of roles. Furthermore, Discord has the possibility to set up automated administration tools that raise users’ roles based on their contribution to the channel. A sort of career ladder: the more I contribute, the more I gain importance within the channel and keep improving. Some channels might also be reserved for “master” users only.
- Purpose: This is an intrinsic element of a small size community: the purpose of creating something new and meaningful is shared by all participants, as this is the only reason for joining such a well defined and small network. The basic thinking is that together it is possible to reach something transcendent and meaningful that goes beyond ourselves.
