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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Spinks
Read between
February 4 - April 10, 2024
Attendees didn't know what to expect. They were so used to being the only community professional at an event, and having to explain what they do a hundred times because no one understood what community management actually was.
“Our philosophy [was] to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.”
a more successful customer is a more loyal customer.
With one-to-one, you're limited by how many people you can form deep trust and connection with. With one-to-many communication, you can reach more people, but will lack depth. With many-to-many communication, there is no limit.
When people feel like they're a part of a community it becomes their home. They don't want to leave. And they'll step up to contribute and grow the community in ways you can't imagine.
The authors describe a sense of community as “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together.” According to the theory, there are four factors that contribute to a sense of community: membership, influence, integration/fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.
Membership
Boundaries.
Emotional safety.
A sense of belonging and identification.
Personal investment.
A common symbol system.
Influence The second element is influence, or a sense of mattering. It has to work both ways, with members feeling like they have influence over the community and the community having influence over the members.
Influence also speaks to the concept of giving first before asking for anything.
Each member should know that someone is listening, no matter what, even if it's just the community manager.
And for a community to have influence over its members, it simply has to become a place that they care about. It has to provide them with value that they don't want to lose.
Integration and Fulfillment of Needs This essentially means that by joining a community, members get what they hoped to get by joining. It reinforces the idea that your community, like any other product, needs to solve a problem for its members in order to make it worth their time and contribution.
Shared Emotional Connection All healthy communities have a story. Members will have a history of experiences together and the belief that there will be more experiences together in the future.
When talking about the value of community, people often focus on customer retention, and how being a part of a community will make customers more loyal. This value is big and shouldn't be ignored, but the BIG competitive advantage comes from how you activate those loyal customers to contribute their energy, knowledge, and skills. It's their contributions that unlocks scale.
Distributing control on the local level means you're putting control in the hands of the people who are closest to the problem you're trying to solve for. You're empowering the people most familiar with the needs and wants of the specific group of people you're trying to support.
That balance of setting consistent guide rails that everyone works within, while distributing control and decision-making power to your members, is critical for your community to sustainably scale.
You want your community to be the first place people think of when they have a problem that needs solving in your category.
Humans are creatures of habit. When we find something that works, we do it again and again until neural pathways form and it becomes automatic. Whenever we have a problem, and we think about where we can go for a solution, our brain will explore the options we already know and trust. You want your customers to find so much consistent value from your community that it becomes their go-to. You give them the security of knowing there's always a place they can turn.
Owning a topic in people's minds is quite simple (but not easy): you need to successfully solve their problem for them enough times that your community becomes the most efficient and trusted place they know of to get an answer, and they form a new habit. They need to feel confident that if they ask a question in your online community, they will get quality answers in a reasonable amount of time. They need to feel confident that if they show up to your event, the content and the attendees will be high quality, and they'll get the value they came for. Then, whenever the thought pops into their
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Community adds an emotional layer to switching costs. To leave your product would mean leaving their people, their relationships, and sacrificing the social capital they've earned within your community.
TABLE 2.1 The Three Levels of Community Strategy 1. Business level How your community program will drive revenue for your company. 2. Community level How your community will grow and become more healthy and engaged over time. 3. Tactical level The specific initiatives and improvements you work on in order to build a healthy, engaged community, and achieve the business outcomes.
the insights you gather through analytics, surveys, and interviews at each of these levels will tell the story of how the work you're doing week-to-week leads to a healthy and engaged community and drives measurable revenue for your business.
Support: Customer service and support. The goal is to improve customer support and satisfaction, and reduce support costs by empowering members to answer questions and solve problems for each other.
Acquisition: Growth, marketing, and sales. The goal is to increase brand awareness, grow market share, and drive SEO, traffic, and leads, by hosting online and offline community spaces and/or empowering ambassadors to create content, organize events, and advocate on your behalf.
Contribution: Collaboration and crowdsourcing.
Engagement: Customer experience, retention, and loyalty.
Success: Customer success and advancement.
A support forum can look very different from other community spaces and have different engagement metrics. For example, if your community is all about facilitating interesting discussions, you'll generally want more comments, not less. But in a support forum, it's all about optimizing for the best answer. More answers isn't necessarily better, and can result in more confusion for the customer trying to find a solution.
The extreme majority of people coming to the forum are just looking for a solution to their problem, not a social experience.
There's absolutely a wrong way to use community to drive sales. But when it's done right, and authentically, it can become your company's strongest growth engine.
The truth with all open platforms is that a very small percentage of users are going to generate most of the content. Some studies show that 80 percent of the content will be created by 20 percent of the users. And, at a big enough size, it's possible that only 1 percent of your members will be consistent, active contributors. That's why it's so important that you make your contributors successful. A small group can have outsized impact on the rest of your business.
Support Improve customer satisfaction and save on support costs. Support for cost savings Reduced customer churn Improved customer service experience ratings Product Improve products with feedback and insights from the community. Revenue generated from community-sourced ideas Reduced R&D time and costs Decisions influenced by community feedback Acquisition Acquire new leads, customers or users. New customers, members, or users acquired through community Pipeline (community-qualified leads, prospects and opportunities) generated Increased sales conversion rate and reduced sales cycle time
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Here's the thing: the community will organically still drive value in the other areas whether or not you've made it a priority.
All strategic frameworks aim to take a big nebulous goal and make it more specific. They all do this with three elements: The goal you're trying to achieve The measures that will tell you if you've achieved that goal The actions you'll take in order to achieve the goal
For Ironclad, the business level of their community strategy looks like this: Goal: Grow sales pipeline each quarter. Measures: Pipeline touchpoints, “Logos Won.” Actions: Host valuable events to build trust and authority with prospects. The actions from your business-level strategy will become your goals for the community level of your strategy. The community level of Ironclad's strategy looks like this: Goal: Host valuable events to build trust and authority with prospects. Measures: Five events hosted, 75 target accounts in attendance, NPS of 85, or higher. Actions: Send very personalized
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The community builder must show up consistently, time-and-time again, even when no one else shows up, or engagement is slow.
Rituals will start to take shape. New roles will form in the community, informally at first, and over time become formalized, like moderator or ambassador programs.
Your job as a community builder becomes less about creation and more about facilitation. The tree is growing, and you're watering it, trimming it, keeping it healthy. You're shaping the culture, and looking for opportunities to better formalize your processes.
The community should have a clear set of guidelines and a system for enforcing those guidelines.
When you build community, you're essentially creating a social identity. You're creating and reinforcing a set of beliefs, expressions, and actions for members to adopt and engage in. Everything you build for your community, your forums, events, logos, playbooks, etc. all exist to reinforce that shared identity and create spaces for people who share that identity to gather.
The Social Identity Cycle consists of three stages: Identification. The person identifies with the community and is attracted to the social identity of the group. Participation. The person takes some sort of action to participate in a community experience. Validation. Participation is rewarded in some way, making them feel good about their participation, which strengthens their investment in the shared identity, and the cycle repeats.
Social categorization. We see ourselves as being in the same general category as the community (e.g., I like baseball and live in New York so I'll start watching Yankees games). Social identification. We see ourselves as a member of the group and start to adopt the shared identity (e.g., I am a Yankee fan and will wear Yankee gear to represent my fanhood). Social comparison. We identify so strongly that we start comparing our in-group to out-groups and tie our self-esteem to the status of our group (e.g., I care deeply about the success of the Yankees, and despise the Boston Red Sox).
three questions that will help you define the social identity of your community: People: Who are we? Purpose: What do we believe? Participation: What do we do?
