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.
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.
Is there a collaboration driver?
So if you had your community on Twitter, for example, you might never have even taken the time to get everyone’s name and email address, and then when you need to contact people, you’re reaching out one by one.
Existing community versus owned platform
I 100 percent believe companies can get a lot of value simply being a contributor to a community. One company that does this very well is MailChimp.
MailChimp is very invested in the creative community, so they sponsor events within that community.
That’s their way of staying in touch. They used to have a user forum on their website, and they shut it down, in maybe 2011, because they recognized people were spending significantly more time on social than on their website.
They shifted their community model to be quite a bit more passive. But, it has to be said, everyone knows that MailChimp is a great company, they genuinely advocate for their users, they care about them, they’re delightful.
So, you can interact with and engage in other people’s communities and represent yourself that way. And a way that’s typically done is through sponsorship or just pure participation.
That can engender a lot of goodwill.
The bottom line
One of our clients right now has built some bots to automate some community manager tasks, which is really interesting. A lot of it is very smart; it helps community managers scale their work.
For example, they created a bot that matches new users to other users who are interesting in them. So the bot will ping a new or existing user, and say, “Hey, there’s this person whose interest matches yours. We think you should meet.”
That’s genuinely awesome and useful. But it obviously does not replace the human element of the community, what communities are founded on.
“Hey, I saw that you just joined. I love what you’re doing. By the way, you should definitely speak with so-and-so because they’re interested in something similar to you. I bet you two would love each other.”
What we learned from the experience is that you can’t plan your way out of problems. If we were able to plan effectively, we wouldn’t have been in a crisis in the first place. Our success wasn’t the product of our own brilliance, but our willingness to experiment. That’s how we came across the “happy accident” that led to the events business.
The truth is that it takes some bad luck to get into a problem and it takes some good luck to get out of one. Sound management can help stem the bleeding, but if you are ever going to rebuild a successful business, you have to experiment and allow for the unexpected.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
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Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
