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

by David Spinks

The question isn't whether or not community is important. For a business that has to optimize every dollar spent and ruthlessly prioritize what it focuses on, the question is, “Why should we invest in community over all of the other things we could be investing in?”

What does a successful community look like? These are the questions I've spent my whole career working to answer. And these days, a week doesn't go by that I'm not asked by a number of businesses who are trying to figure it out.

book, I want you to understand what it means to be a community-driven business. I want you to understand how to drive higher trust, lower costs, and scale every part of the customer and sales journey in a way traditional businesses can only dream. I want you to have everything you need to build real belonging for your people and make community your competitive advantage.

Putting the customer first became a competitive advantage. This trend grew as social networks continued to give consumers more power and access. Companies started hiring full content and social media teams to build trust and to connect more personally with customers.

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.

Companies are setting themselves apart by tapping into the collective energy, knowledge, and contributions of your most passionate customers, fans, and partners.

When people feel like they're a part of a community it becomes their home. They don't want to leave.

It's a shared identity! It's shared passion! It's people who care about each other! It's a neighborhood! It's religion! It's a belief! It's family! It's a fanbase! It's my friends! It's a sports team!

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.

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.

People who acknowledge that others' needs, values, and opinions matter to them are often the most influential group members, while those who always push to influence, try to dominate others, and ignore the wishes and opinions of others are often the least powerful members.

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.

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.

But without clearly defined membership, an exchange of influence, fulfillment of needs, and a shared emotional connection, it's fair to assume that the strength of community amongst a group is pretty weak.

The Unrivaled Scalability of Community When you give people a true sense of community, it motivates them to want to get involved and contribute. Motivate enough people, and community can help you achieve incredible scale.

You need to invest properly into the right people and systems in order to set community up to succeed. With the right foundation in place, the sky is the limit for how much they can accomplish.

What community does is it extends the capacity and impact of each of those teams by organizing community members to contribute to the same kinds of projects and goals.

To empower people means trusting them.

The idea is to create guide rails within which members will contribute. To host more local events, for example, companies will create a playbook that guides members on how to run an event, what the design requirements are, how to select speakers, the code of conduct, and anything else that they want to be consistent across the program.

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.

TED gives them a massive guide that walks them through everything they need to know to run an event.

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.

Ultimately, what makes a business successful is the same thing that makes a community successful: Owning a topic in people's minds.

One reason that community is becoming more important is that it's becoming much easier to build

products, but it's always going to be very difficult to copy a community.

Community, on the other hand, can't be copied, because community isn't software. Someone can copy the look, feel, and functionality of your forum, but they'll lack the people, relationships, emotional investment, and social identity that an established community has.

A realistic timeline for a community to drive value for a business is more like 6–12 months.

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. There's a social cost to leaving your product. Good fo...

Truly great companies exist to have a positive impact on people's lives and make the world a better, more equitable, and more sustainable place.

There are two things that every community program should focus on: How it creates value, belonging, and emotional safety for members How it creates value and measurable results for the business

It's about taking a balanced approach. You have to make sure that you're building a growing and sustainable business so that you can put the proper resources into achieving your mission. And you have to make sure that you're always listening to and considering the needs of the people your business impacts.

A community is a business. A business is a community.

A great business focuses on serving people and building an incredible culture. And a great community figures out a way to be financially sustainable, so that it can continue to serve its members.

Building community as a hobby is nice. But if you want to build a community sustainably, at scale, and expand way beyond your own abilities and resources, you need to look at it like a business.

Building belonging is no easy task. It takes a proper investment, the right team, and a genuine interest in helping your members. But if you do it right, you'll have a massive positive impact on your business's bottom line AND on the lives of everyone your business touches. Notes

Community engagement on its own is not a measure of business value. It won't tell you anything about how community impacted the bottom line.

The key is to communicate how community engagement is also achieving business goals that impact revenue and growth. They both matter. Business goals without a focus on building an authentic, healthy community will result in low engagement and trust. Community engagement goals without a focus on achieving business goals will result in an underfunded, undersupported community team.

Altogether, 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.

“For every one customer who complains, there are 26 customers who stay silent,” says Kobe.

Truth-be-told, this is one of the hardest objectives to tie directly back to revenue. How do you measure the value of a piece of feedback? What's the value of innovation? Sometimes companies can estimate the specific cost savings in research and development, like Techsmith, who found that crowdsourcing ideas from their community saved them $500,000.2

You should absolutely not come in hard with a cold-sale in a community, certainly not if you haven't established trust already. But you should look at every interaction someone has with your community as a touchpoint in the sales journey.

Engagement is the most popular objective for community programs, with 33 percent of companies reporting that this is the primary goal of their

community.3 It's often what we think of when a business says “our community.”

We just know that there was a “first touch,” a “last touch,” and that these were all touchpoints that likely contributed to their decision.

business. “Look at all of these amazing ways community can drive value for sales, product, support, and marketing!” they'd proclaim in their slide deck, presenting to the executives who tasked them with coming up with the strategy. “LET'S INVEST IN ALL THE SPACES!”

Each objective requires working with a different team in the business (product, support, marketing, customer, etc.) so now they have to coordinate communications and manage expectations of basically every group in the company.