The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage

by David Spinks

Topic-based discussion: Have a topic or theme for the call, and leave it open to participants to jump in with their thoughts and opinions.

Commitment and next steps: Finish the discussion by asking each participant to share one commitment they will make as a result of the discu...

it's important to model the behavior you want your participants to bring to the discussion. If you want them to be vulnerable, then you should kick off with a vulnerable story. If you want them to ask a more techni...

the majority of members are looking for your guidance on how to contribute thoughtfully to the space. Ambiguity is stressful for someone who's new to an established community. All of those rituals and expressions of identity we spoke about earlier are new to them. They want someone to hold their hand through it.

Onboarding is a great opportunity to be explicit in guiding members on how to participate in online spaces as well.

be explicit about how you'd like people to participate in the space.

To facilitate vulnerable interaction, you must have a small, private space. Then, like we discussed in the previous section, you need to provide very specific rules and guidelines to make members confident that they're in a safe space.

Keep Your Rules Short and Simple to Start

I recommend having no more than 10 rules and offer more detailed guidelines in your code of conduct.

1. What's Shared Here Stays Here

use this rule any time I have a small group discussion where I want people to be able to be open and honest with each other.

2. Give More Than You Take

A healthy community requires that members are contributing at least as much as they're taking out.

So just create a dedicated thread, or section, for promoting your own work, and don't allow it anywhere else in the community.

3. Critique the Idea, Not the Person

Use your analytics to tell you who your most active members are so you can interview them and get deeper insights into what motivates them to keep showing up.

You can identify the members who joined the community, took one action and never came back, and set up interviews with them, too. That'll give you great insights into how you can improve your onboarding process and engage your new members more effectively.

Engagement Is a Constant Experiment

You need to try different things, and likely fail, to get to the approach that works for you

don't be afraid of an event not working. Don't be afraid of a post getting no replies. In fact, you should expect things not to work a whole lot before it starts to work.

People have to respond to a personal invitation or risk looking like they're ignoring you. There's immediate social pressure in a personal invitation.

Instead of creating an RSVP page to your event and blasting it out to your email and social accounts, personally invite the right 20 people and just send the event details to them in an email. It lets them know that the event will be curated with good people and that they were personally selected.

In the online communities I run, we always have a rule that every question must get at least three quality answers in 24 hours. If it's not happening organically, we make it happen. I'll start messaging other members privately and ask them to jump in and answer the question.

It's way too easy to ignore a public ask. It's nearly impossible to ignore a private, personal invitation.

We tag every new member who joins our community and ask them to introduce themselves. We do this because it makes them feel special, getting a personal tag, and because it makes them feel seen, which will increase the likelihood that they'll actually introduce themselves.

Referring back to the community lifecycle, in the growth stage you'll start to see more organic engagement in the community, and by the time it gets to maturity, most engagement will be organic.

But there's something powerful about inviting people to participate in an experience and letting them opt in instead of telling them to participate in an experience that will help you get more buy-in.

People only really see the content that works. The content that doesn't work gets buried pretty quick.

And if you want to build a community, and create engaging content for your community, you'll need to create a lot of content and host a lot of events that just won't work. It's an art, and art takes risk.

when kicking off a debate in an online community, I always make it clear that I'm intending to start a debate. This helps members understand that we're engaging in a thought exercise to learn together, rather than a personal, emotional disagreement. I'll start off and say something like, “There's been a lot of discussion on this topic, and I'd love to kick off a proper debate so we can explore both arguments.”

Another way to make a debate more engaging and effective is to make your prompt a statement that they need to agree or disagree with, rather than leaving it open-ended.

Middleton breaks down community conflict into five levels: Difference – members have a different preference or taste that they are both comfortable with Misunderstanding – a member doesn't have the same information as another member and think they disagree but they just don't have the full story Disagreement – members actually disagree and feels discomfort about the disagreement, creating strain on the relationship Discord – one party identifies a trend of disagreements over time creating significant strain on the relationship Polarization – the relationship is actively hostile and members may refuse to engage in constructive behaviors. “You want to keep all conflicts in level 1 and 2”, says Middleton. “You can edge into level 3, but you don't want to stay there for long.”

conflict in a community can be a good thing. It's how that conflict is processed and how people treat each other during the conflict that matters. If they attack the person and not the idea, that's a recipe for toxicity. If they can keep the conversation focused on the ideas, and on learning from each other's perspectives, it will actually deepen the sense of connection and belonging within the group.

You have to fully own your mistakes, apologize sincerely, and involve the community in taking clear and decisive action to remedy the issue. I

When in doubt, I always default to transparency. When our community sends us private feedback on what they want to see improved at CMX Summit, we summarize their feedback and share it back out (anonymized) so that everyone can see what the feedback was.

For businesses that are new to community, they'll often try to maintain that same brand voice in their community. But it's really important that you, as the community leader, use your own personal voice.

Having a diverse community team with unique voices will help you connect with more people in the community.

“Always be yourself, so that the people looking for you can find you.”

Don't try to be a brand. Don't try to be a “leader,” whatever that means. Just be a person who's there to serve the community, and hopefully give your members a lot of value.