(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...One of the most sacred principles in social media is the concept of “the community”. It serves as the foundation of what social media marketers base their business models and methodologies on. “Engage your community” we are told. “Engage or die”.
Companies today are seeking to create their own communities, be they formulated around the company itself or around brands the company produces. Some of these attempts do well, others fail. Those that fail do so for a variety of reasons.
The unfortunate truth is that the term “community” is now so overly used and utterly misconstrued that it has become meaningless as a way of capturing the true essence of what it really is. It has now become a catch all phrase often used by social media strategists to describe an ideal that doesn’t exist. It’s become a presumptive description of customers or of end users in whatever form they come in, positioning them as already wanting to connect to a product line or a company. Many in social media end up contributing to this echo chamber, maintaining their standing in online discussions all the while causing damage to the concept as a whole.
So I’ll offer my key points on community:
1) Most organizations and/or brands don’t have communities. They have users, customers, and/or clients. Period.
When I hear social media strategists push the idea that companies must reach out to their community I often want to throw up. That’s because they make the presumption that a community already exists, that it’s there, waiting to be engaged. All the company has to do wake up and just engage with them.
That’s absurd. Most companies and their brands don’t have communities-in-waiting. They have users. They have customers. And often those users or customers have no desire to be “engaged”. They simply want to buy the product, use it, and move on.
2) Most product lines and services offerings aren’t of the nature that they could or should hold a community.
Ballpoint pens, vacuum cleaners, rakes, acne medicine, ketchup. All products that can inspire brand loyalty. All products that can be cleverly marketed via social media. I can’t see how any of them would have a naturally based community just waiting to be engaged. Nor do I see how any of them could support a the creation and maintenance of a longstanding vibrant community.
I love Tropicana No Pulp Orange Juice. Love the stuff. It tastes great and it’s nutritious. If a store doesn’t sell it or is out of stock, I may chose not to buy what they have and wait to buy it somewhere else. I’ll pay more for it. But I’m not part of their community. I have no desire to be part of a Tropicana No Pulp Orange Juice community. I wouldn’t necessarily feel an affinity with others who like to drink it. I don’t need to get in online conversations about the juice or get email newsletters or connect with other users of the drink. I’m a loyal customer. Tropicana doesn’t need to “engage” with me. Just keep making great juice.
Each and every one of us uses hundreds of products that we like and that we may have a sense of loyalty to, but we don’t have the time to formulate a special relationship with. We don’t need to read the blog run by the company that’s our preferred brand of toilet paper. We just expect it to work, just like we expect the little refrigerator light to come on when we open the refrigerator door.
This goes back to what Alan (Tangerine Toad) Wolk calls “Your brand is not my friend”, which, by extension, means “I don’t need to be part of your community”. It’s not a rejection, it’s a level of satisfaction with the status quo, often along with a desire to be left alone.
3) It ain’t a community…unless it’s a community
The study by Deloitte, Beeline and SNCR points to the fact that many brand community efforts fail. I’m going to suggest that simply having a group of signed up members that is not, within itself, having a community. Especially if they show no interest in being part of something. The community didn’t fail, the effort failed. In fact, it was never a community in the first place. Calling something a particular label doesn’t make it as such.There may have been a shared interest in a topic, and even an interest to belong, but if there was no means to harness that interest, then it was never a community.
4) A community must be composed of members who have a dedicated interest in the subject at hand.
The key word there is dedicated. Casual won’t do. Committed to the product., the service, the cause. Ironically, the interest itself doesn’t have to be forged in passion. Work responsibilities may require an individual to know a certain computer program or travel on a certain airline. But there has to be a central point of focus that’s based upon an emotional desire to connect.
5) Community members will have a sense of shared experience or interest that’s strong enough to create a sense of belonging.
Most of us want to be part of something, to feel as if we belong. We’re social. Hence, social media. We seek out those who have common interests and experiences. I am a member of “Red Sox Nation”, one of many fanatical Boston Red Sox fans who passionately follow the (lately mostly) ups and (traditionally mostly) downs of their success. When I’ve gone on online forums to discuss the latest news and stuff, practically everyone interchangeably uses the word “we” to describe them, us, and the team. That’s common with devoted fans as they discuss their common passion. “We” - the community - have something at stake.
6) A desire by the members to develop a sense of cohesiveness and to continue as a community
Think BlogHer. Think of how a group of thousands of women came together to formulate an organization, an online publication, a conference. They are the essence of community. Somewhat spontaneous. Diverse. But committed. BlogHer is a beautiful phenomenon whose connectivity of its members is not falsely contrived by a social media marketer.
Women bloggers aren’t a community if they don’t connect. Demographic descriptions aren’t communities. The commonality of gender does not make them a community in itself. It’s a common sense of interest and passions of career and motherhood and health and sexuality and, yes, community that brought them together. BlogHer members are enriching one another and will continue to seek to enrich one another because they are the essence of community. They are sharing and they are caring.
7) Large groups of users of a diverse service aren’t members of a community
They’re just users.
There ’s a guy who will go nameless who nevertheless has impressed me very much. A little over a year ago he began making YouTube videos out of his dorm room where he began giving advice to the presidential candidates who to use YouTube as a communications tool to voters. He kept on saying that the campaigns should be reaching out to “the YouTube community”.
But wait…there is no YouTube community. Just like there’s no NBC community. Or Google community. There’s users and subscribers and viewers. There may be communities WITHIN those entities, but not with the outlet as a whole. If there was there’d be wholesale outrage against Viacom for their battle with YouTube.
The concept of community remains one of the most important in social media. But it we overuse it or misuse it, then we’ll turn off key people in marketing who are looking to move product and enhance brand.
Had to get that off my chest.
Filed under: Abraham Harrison LLC, Community News, Social Meda, Social Media Index
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Nice reality check.
You are so spot on with this article. This year as educators converged on our National Education and Computing Conference (NECC) - all we heard was “social networking” and “community” — everyone was touting it as the next greatest thing.
However, it wasn’t really because we needed it or wanted it, but because someone somewhere told them it was the “thing” we wanted.
We connect and create our own communities quite nicely and there are places we do want to connect, but you’re right — it is the places where we have our passion as well as necessity of sharing best practice (like our student information systems and textbooks).
If these companies would allow their employees to connect and understand the networks then I think we would see more meaningful, real uses of community emerge from companies.
Nice. This is the wake up call that a lot of people seeking community manager positions need to be hearing. And, I say that as someone who needs to hear this.
This is a nice push back - push sideways? - making me think about how to talk about “community” and “conversations”.
What strikes me most, is that building a “community” is not a top-down process. You cannot build a community for other people. The structure or access might be provided (I think of my pregnancy due-date group facilitated by the newsgroup misc.kids.pregnancy thirteen years ago and still going strong discussing our pre-teens) but the communication, the practical, social, and emotional connectivity has to come from the members of the community themselves. To me, Twitter has become a community more than Facebook or Linked-In, but that’s my own fault because of the way I use them.
Gosh, I don’t know what to say here… there are so many different types of communities, many of which can surely be manufactured.
* Communities of Action
* Communities of Circumstance
* Communities of Interest
* Communities of Position
* Communities of Practice
* Communities of Purpose
Many of these can be created, in much the same way that one may create a garden. I think the biggest problem with these sort of things — community-creation — is that people do it wrong, and they have been doing it wrong for at least a decade.
Back in the day, when I worked at Caucus Systems, we manufactured communities for businesses — virtual teams, virtual conferences, and whatnot. And it worked quite well, to be sure, and they were powerful and transforming.
What most companies don’t understand is that communities require facilitators and managers. They always have. AOL hired community managers back in 1995 when they created communities, the Well and Caucus and Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms have paid and unpaid community managers and facilitators.
The mistake that most companies make is that they assume that if they build it, they will come. It is not true. You can create a Wiki, a Message Board, Forums, or a Blog and it doesn’t mean anything at all.
In fact, people will spend all of this time putting together a message board, fill it with conversation-starters, and then open the doors, promote the hell out of it, and still nothing will happen.
What is required to manufacture a community is passionate members — and they can be paid. However, if they’re paid, you need to hire them from a pool of OD experts or a pool of topical experts — or, you can poach them from another community, always the best way.
So, Wordpress and phpBB are not killer apps, the killer apps are the people who start conversation, the people who re-seed conversation, the people who catalyze conversation, the people who show interest and ask questions, and the people who protect the other members through active moderation.
Hell, get Wordpress, phpBB, or Wikimedia for free — or buy vBulletin for some money — and put the rest of your budget towards hiring professional Community Managers.
Hell, if it weren’t for Jonathan Trenn on Marketing Conversation, we would be done for. He’s the glue and he’s the only reason why you are all here.
Amen!
A few weeks ago, I attended a conference where someone said, like you did, that some product/services lend themselves nicely to having a community while others don’t because the first one’s have some kind of place in the conversation we have online/offline because of, like you said, they trigger the emotional desire to connect, while the others don’t. i.e: people like to talk to others about their dogs doing this or that, their new recipe which taste so good…people don’t feel like talking about their credit cards!
You’ve just said everything I’ve wanted to say about communities for a good few months now. Thanks so much for this post.
The problem with communities, as you’ve hinted, is the potential for community fatigue. Weak communities are pointless communities. For a community to form it needs a very strong emotional bond with the company, but not just the company, but what the company stands for.
My biggest complaint is we’re acting like this is some radical new thing that technology is only just allowing. That’s just not true. Instead technology has just allowed for the proliferation of communities as it’s become easier to do.
Generally, communities that were successful before the internet, have been a runaway success online. But, online, they have also become far more visible to other companies who want to emulate this success. This new visibility is what I expect is driving these communities. These new communities isn’t aware that these groups existed before the internet, and so give the sociological aspect far less focus.
Finally, one seperate point I would add is that communities can be internal to the company. Sure, you might not care about your toilet paper. The odds are you probably don’t want to connect with others who use the same toilet paper. But for those that work to make and sell that toilet paper, it’s a big deal.
They see each other every day, they might very well be enticed to become a closer community. A community who can discuss important issues online and offline, and a community which can increase productivity and the retention rate of staff. Maybe even become a beacon to potential new recruits.
I’d never underestimate communities within companies. These are the ones whom might really benefit from such technology and the right facilitators.
Thanks so much to all for your kind comments and responses.
What inspired this post was the constant dribbling of many social media strategists who push the idea that every company/brand/organization already has a community out there (whether they know it or not) and they, of course, should engage with it.
It’s the essence within a community that makes it special. Whether it’s forged by a passion or a need to collaborate, they exist because of the common desire for its members to bond.
I obviously have a different viewpoint than many in this field. I honestly think some of them hurt the field as they push, push, push the concept to befuddled audiences.
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I have to agree with Chris - its all well and good to start off with a bold headline like “the fallacy of community” and lead in with a sweeping statement about the “community” concept throughout all of social media.
Unless I missed something though all of the supporting arguments were limited to one type of community: brands - even that argument doesn’t hold up 100% of the time.
Isn’t “community” an underlying principle of Apple’s evangelism marketing? Find and create a community of passionate users who will tell others and bring them into the fold - right?
I’ll grant you that “community” like many, many concepts is both over and mis-used but we don’t need to flame the entire concept.
Marco
Where do I start?
Reread what I wrote. I don’t see where I flamed the entire concept here.
This post was not denigrating the concept of community. I started out by writing how it is a sacred principle. I finish by saying that it is one of the most important concepts in social media.
The point of this article was to bring attention to the fact that many social media strategists automatically expound on how brands must “engage their community”. And many of these strategists say it as if it applies to everything out there.
I then point out that most brands don’t really have a community. They are also, by their very nature, not the type of product that can engender a community.
But to me, so many social media strategists are caught up in the concept of community that they don’t recognize this. So they continue their mantra about “community”, actually damaging the concept because it seems irrelevant to the brand, causing marketing managers to pull away.
Yes, these point were about brands…because that’s what I was talking about.
Your bringing up Apple is telling. There is nothing in what I wrote that contradicts how community can be important - no, vital - as a mean of marketing. But you choose a brand (after pointing out that I seem to be only concerned about brands) that has a natural affinity for a community. That’s low hanging fruit. Also, it’s a technology product. Please. The great fallback category that’s always used.
Can’t you see I’m talking about the rhetoric that many use about practically any and all products? Not just the Apple’s of the world that have been able to garner communities for a couple of decades?
To me, you’re automatically defending the concept of community when I haven’t attacked it. I’m trying to bolster it and keep it genuine.
Jonathan,
You are absolutely right - I did one of the things I am most irritated by and allowed myself to filter your thoughts based on an assumption of intent on your part that wasn’t there - I apologize.
Communities have been a vital and central part of political and grassroots advocacy campaigns for quite some time now and I am a passionate believer in and defender of their importance.
I have become particularly sensitive to a growing number of small but aggressive voices on FriendFeed and Twitter who seemed more concerned with setting themselves apart by tearing down other’s ideas rather than working to truly advance a constructive narrative on how these tools can be used to change the way information is communicated for the good - this is obviously not your intent.
I think the 3 causes you identify in your “more on the fallacy” post are dead on - there are a number of people who understand some of these concepts enough to sound impressive but not enough to truly make them work.
I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts in the future.
BTW Apple was indeed a slow-moving softball over the middle of the plate - what can I say I was typing fast while feeding and keeping the little guy entertained!
Can you explain: “as a natural affinity for a community. That’s low hanging fruit. Also, it’s a technology product. Please. The great fallback category that’s always used.”
I’m concerned that implies that Apple finds it easier to have a community. That simply isn’t the case. Apple worked harder than any other company to create that community. They employed staff members (like Guy Kawasaki) to evangelise this community.
Here is the fundmental difference. Microsoft, IBM and co produced technology companies then used marketing to get people to buy them.
Apple knows its customers and continually created products for them. Everything to do with Apple is orientated towards community.
If Apple seems to have it easy with a natural affinity, it has nothing to do with their industry sector. It’s because they make it look easy.
Companies in a variety of other industries have developed great communities. JetBlue and Southwest in Airlines for example, Harley Davidson in motorcycles and even Starbucks.
Hello again Richard
Yes, Apple did work hard to create a community. They created products with their customers in mind. The created “personal computers” (but not PCs)…things that people ended up finding great value in.
Plus, tech products often have people who are already online who once talked on Usenet who now talk and share in online forums, etc.
The companies you mention are all low hanging fruit. Everyone mentions Harley Davidson, Starbucks, Southwest. Throw in Nike and Whole Foods.
That’s not knocking them. That means that they have an internal business culture along with a type of product or products or service or services that can breed that.
You could probably find hotel chains, clothing lines, food companies that could do the same. But all of that misses my point….
My beef here is not with the concept of community. If anything, I’m trying to, in a way, protect that concept. My beef is with some social media strategists who seem to feel that every company out there should be engaging their community…when the company doesn’t have a community. I also make the point that most product aren’t capable of having a community. They’re function is often too mundane.
As far as Apple, my point can apply this way. They couldn’t engage their community at first…because they didn’t have one….so it took people like Guy Kawasaki (and others) to help create one. It took work to do that. And the product itself was conducive to have a community.
Take a look at my latest post. “The Fallacy Continues:. 15 out of 16 community building efforts are failing to actually create a community. My guess as to why? Poor execution based on faulty assumption and products that are ot necessarily community ready.
Again, I’m NOT knocking the concept of community. I’m knocking the overuse and misuse of the term…a trend I see happening and a trend that’s somewhat responsible for 15 out of 16 efforts not making the grade.
I think you really beat the snot out of a straw man. While I understand (really I live it every day) that community is over used I think that your central assumption is wrong. Brands (at least the ones we talk to) aren’t thinking about creating communities based on their consumer good products. They are creating communities that link together their consumers around a key point of interest.
For example, a golf apparel brand may create a community for people who are interested in teaching children how to play golf. People aren’t going on to the community to talk about the brand, they care about best practices, tips, and empathy. The brand gets associated with caring about the future of the game and may have some advertising on the property targeting the parents since they are likely to be the brand’s ideal demographic. As long as they are transparent about who they are, nobody will care who the sponsor of the community is- as long as the community has value to the membership.
So, fine, “Community” might be over used as a term but I don’t see the situation you’re talking about happen very often.
Sam
You’re not understanding what I’m saying.
I have nothing against the concept of community. In fact, I embrace it. You don’t have to defend it. It isn’t necessary.
What I’m against the automatic mantra espoused by a lot of people I’ve heard over the past two years who seem to simply repeat the same phrases over and over. “Embrace your community” when they don’t have a community. “Engage or die” when death isn’t imminent. I’ve constantly heard this in discussions, on blog posts, on Twitter. It gets ridiculous. Most of them have never come close to building a community.
They mistake current users of a product or, for that matter current potential users of a product as already being members of a company’s community. They aren’t.
And they will say this about any type of product, even it the product is not one that’s conducive to communities.
In your example, a company used (from what I’m going to guess) your company’s software (folks, that’s http:..www.smallworldlabs.com) to create a community over time. They didn’t embrace something that didn’t exist, they used tools to create one.
That’s what should be happening.