The past week I wrote about the trends shaping and accelerating the community building ecosystem. In short, there are 5 growing factors and one major paradigm shift:
Market factor 🤑
Research factor 🧑🏽🏫
Structural factor 🧑🏽💻
Societal factor 🌎
Covid-19 factor 🦠
Paradigm shift: New Power rules 📏
Today I will address 3 rules I’ve discovered in all the successful communities out there, both digital and IRL.
Despite being “obvious” I also found many community builders (myself included) usually fail in following them, though. My hypothesis is that the rules appear to be counterintuitive due to the heritage of the institutional web 2.0.
Let’s jump right away into the rules, then.
Unbreakable Rules (that almost everyone breaks)
Content > Publicity
Communities are built around the value received by their members. And in our information-based world, the value is better conveyed through content.
This truism seems to be forgotten especially by those in very institutionalized environments. I’ve seen many NGOs and entrepreneurs trapped in the “advertisement” swamp. Instead of focusing on delivering content, many try to craft clickable baits.
Community members and prospects expecting value react negatively to this practice and the community never roots, never is born, never grows.
Does it mean I am implying community building is a kind of ethereal being not linked to marketing or promotion? Hell, no! But there is an old principle we should not forget: what does not exist in reality, marketing cannot create. If there is no valuable content, you won’t be able to build a community, despite all the marketing dollars you waste.
Another way to say this is that belonging follows value. The majority of people do not join a community to belong, but to satisfy an expectation. These expectations can be of many kinds, but I’d argue all can be placed inside one of these boxes:
The expectation of solving a problem
The expectation of satisfying a need
The expectation to earning an extra
Authenticity > Trendiness
When you are a community builder your content must honestly reflect who you are. This rule is a natural next step to the first one.
What I mean by this is that content is valuable to a community when is valuable to you. The things that matter to you should be taken care of and ensure are non-negotiables.
Let me give a stupid example. Let’s say you are a family-friendly restaurant. By no means you would advertise your business with nude shows, right? “But… but… sex sells”. Yeah: sex sells sex, not family meals.
[believe it or not, this is a real example I faced in my previous life as a consultant]
The same applies to communities. A community will form itself around common goals and common values that are non-negotiable. And in order to attract new people to it, we need to create an enticing piece of communication that doesn't break what it stands for and creates curiosity and desire to join.
When crafting messaging and advertisement efforts, we must ensure we create something shiny, something that attracts the attention of the correct people. In the words of Jack Conte, we need to adjust everything but the core of our community.
The package should be the home of your values and goals, not the jail.
One interesting approach to this well-crafted package was made by Veritasium in his video about click-baits.
There he analyzed the elements of YouTube thumbnails and titles and found four quadrants:
Misleading and withholding information
Not misleading and withholding information
Misleading and not withholding information
Not misleading and not withholding information
In terms of our communities and how we convey their value proposition to current and prospective members, we can see that happening too.
Just like in YouTube, we should aim to create “legitbaits” or really enticing pieces of communication that drives curiosity and bring the correct members into our group by saying the truth about what we believe and what we pursue.
Participation > Consumption
This third rule is also rooted in how the web was born and how it evolved to web 2.0
All the infrastructure of our internet was developed to enrich the experience of consuming content. The problem with that is that communities are by definition active. To be healthy, they demand all their members engage in some way or another.
Yeah, of course there are some members that do not seem to be very active, but that doesn’t mean we should optimize our communities for them. We must ensure our value is delivered in a way that promotes engagement and leaves room for the individual freedom to choose how (and if) to participate.
I don’t care right now about the distribution of the members inside a community. We can argue in favour of a double Pareto or a 90-9-1 rule. What I want to stress here is that communities should be optimized to allow all the members to participate in whatever fashion they fancy.
Some may be passive consumers, others may be remixers or sharers, and a bunch may raise as co-creators or hyper-active members. That’s fine. We should cater for all members and give real paths for the value to be delivered.
Are our passive consumers receiving valuable content? Are they “lurking” or are they real “active consumers”?
Are our sporadic visitors receiving value? Are we helping them moving to a more active stage?
Are our remixers and sharers being able to remix and share? What obstacles can we bulldoze for them?
Are our power members being able to raise their game? Do they feel valuable for the community and valued by the community?
This rule faces the challenge of the lack of great participation-based platforms. We have Discord, Patreon, Luma, Geneva, and a ton more, but almost everyone agrees that we are still lacking a complete tool.
We still are in the nascent era of the participatory social internet and because of that or we choose a couple of tools that help us with our community, or we have to build our own solution.
These rules imply something I did not address at the beginning of my essay: I’m thinking about communities as products. And that allows me to think about community-builders as creators and/or entrepreneurs.
I will address that entrepreneurial nature in a future post, but for now, I’d better finish this one (I’ve been accused, fairly, of verbosity).
Next week I will address some conditions of a healthy community and how they shape the work of community builders.
Bye for now.