At its core, a community is a group of people and the connections formed between them. These groups, connections, and shared interests can exist on any channel. A community is channel-agnostic, whereas something like social media is, by definition, channel-specific. This is the core to build a social business community.
It often comes back to the question, “Where do we interact with people?”
Sometimes that is on social. So, while social is a completely valid channel on which to build connections and interact with community members, the community itself extends far beyond social media.
With new or developing roles there often isn’t a lot of consensus on what the day-to-day looks like. What’s your take on a community manager’s primary contributions?
If you look at individual activities, they can be incredibly variant from company to company, particularly from a startup to large brands.
However, if you look at it in the context of, “What is the function of a community?” that’s about advocating on behalf of customers, driving customer satisfaction, retention, and connecting community members to each other.
So when you look at advocacy and channeling feedback to the product teams to make your product continuously better, those functions are a little bit more encompassing, and there are various activities that can fall into those larger buckets.
The business case for community
I see a lot of people responsible for community strategy falling for the common trap: “If you have a sturdy hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
In reality, while retention, satisfaction, and research are top concerns for brands, you can approach and solve those problems in myriad ways, not just through the community.
We try to look at our work from a strategic lens; instead of beginning with a community strategy — our hammer — and trying to make it fit a problem, we instead begin with the problem itself.
We need to focus on what companies are struggling with, and then find the best tools for the job, the tools that match their challenges and goals.
We’ve had clients who really wanted to invest in a community, but it just was such a huge financial undertaking that I told them, “I think you’d be better off investing in smarter email marketing.”
When it comes to challenges like retention, satisfaction, and innovation, the community is indeed a fantastic tool. But there are also other ways that we can approach those same challenges, and that needs to be acknowledged.
Earlier this year I wrote an article that talks about being an engaging being and not recommending solutions that won’t benefit others, or those they don’t need. Ethically, I feel obligated to do what’s best for my clients even if it’s not in my own interest.
And if I feel they can get better results by doing something else, I’ll recommend they do that.
And of course, there are long-term and short-term trade-offs to every solution, but you really need to understand your client’s values, priorities, and constraints, and then decide on the best solution.
An example of a successful social business community
Nike is doing a phenomenal job with the community right now. A few years ago I wrote about Nike’s stumble with the community, but they took lessons from that experience and really figured things out.
Nike obviously has this cult brand that targets athletes. They’ve found ways to better support their customers who identify as athletes through a variety of approaches, including a suite of apps.
They have three different apps; I actually have all of them on my phone.
There’s Nike Run Club to track your recent runs, Nike Plus, which alerts you to cool gear they’ve just recently released, and Nike Plus Training, which includes workouts that are created by celebrities and influencers.
They also have these on the ground running clubs, or excursions, that head to locations like Montauk or Canada.
All of these initiatives really engender brand loyalty, but they’re also great opportunities for user-generated content.
In total, they’ve created this unique way to engage with their customers and other people around the brand.
They’re just doing a fantastic job of building out a brand community and finding meaningful ways to connect with people.
Collaboration driver
We tend to work more closely with product and design teams. We do work with marketing teams, but very rarely do we work with PR teams.
That is because the goals of PR are generally around reach and impressions, whereas our community initiatives are more about cultivation.
PR agencies are brokers of relationships to the media, whereas we are facilitators of relationships to your customers or to the external world.
So it’s a different way of thinking about business, but Elizabeth is right. The community can be very intertwined with communications, marketing, and PR teams.
Recently, PR teams have approached us about partnering to more proactively build a community for times of crisis.
For example, if something goes wrong and, say, the story is blown out of proportion, the community is able to support and defend you. It’s like built-in reputation management.
This might mean getting in front of the community with what happened before it’s spun by outside publications.
A collaboration example
Product and design teams like Digital Spark Marketing (DSM), because we have a similar ethos about caring for the end-user.
Often, they understand what DSM does quickly. We tend to work with them either through product launches or through user research and insights.
For example, we worked on a project last year where a brand had built out a community platform that was failing, completely flopping. And they brought us in to overhaul the strategy.
What we found through our research was this specific demographic wasn’t particularly tech-savvy, and they were not used to engaging with people online, generally speaking, besides people who they already knew.
They had Facebook accounts, but they were not friends with any of their coworkers on Facebook.
They didn’t really use LinkedIn. Some used Twitter, but they weren’t used to collaborating with people in an active way.
And on top of that these people were very, very busy.
They didn’t want to have to go log into a separate platform to interact with people, and they were practically appalled by the idea of interacting with coworkers on Facebook.
They also had no idea what Slack was; they’d never heard of it.
So ultimately what we decided to do was take a significantly more passive approach to this community platform and, rather than pull people onto the platform, push the content and the information on the platform to them via email, which they use every single day.
That was a huge lesson from a development and product perspective. If you don’t understand your users’ needs, you’re not set up for success from day one.
You’re just building something that hasn’t been validated.
Building community on your own turf
What do you feel are the pros and cons of building a community on a company node, like a forum, versus a platform like Slack?
If you have a platform that users log into and people are already on your website, it’s definitely advantageous to build on your own platform.
However, if you don’t have a digital product on your own website, it can be very hard to get people to come to your website.
There are many websites you use where you love their product, but you never log in.
You’re fighting an uphill battle the equivalent of Uber building out a community on its website. I constantly use Uber, but I never go to Uber’s website — the destination doesn’t make sense.
I do think it’s very important to own relationships with your community members, which is the risk of building on these other platforms.
A lot of those platforms do not allow you to own the data for your community members.
