How to Make Community Your Competitive Advantage

??Week 28:The Business of Belonging ??

How to Make Community Your Competitive Advantage

If you influence a group of customers or people this book will teach you how to build a community.?

A new era of customer relationship: The customer community

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

Sense of Community Theory: 4 Contributing Factors:

• Membership?
• Influence
• Integration/Fulfilment of Needs
• Shared Emotional Connection

Membership (5 Attributes):

1. Boundaries
2. Emotional Safety
3. Sense of Belonging & Identification
4. Personal Investment
5. A common symbol system

Influence:

A sense of mattering - both ways. Influence is also the concept of giving first before asking for anything. It has to provide value and to know someone is listening to you.

Integration and Fulfilment of Needs:

Needs to solve a problem to make it worth their time and contribution. A sense of belonging or feeling of purpose.

Shared Emotional Connection:

All healthy communities have a story. A history of experiences together which form a long-lasting emotional connection.

Community is an extension of your team.?

To empower means to trust them. By giving up some control you remove a massive bottleneck to growth.

What makes a community successful is the same as a business - owning a topic in people’s minds. Building community is one of the most powerful ways to establish your brand as the most trusted leader in a category.?

Owing a Topic; You need to successfully solve their problem enough times, most efficient and trusted place, the audience then forms a habit and goes first for the answers they seek.

Two things 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

3 Levels of Community Strategy:

1. Business Level- how the community drives revenue
2. Community Level - how it will grow and become healthier and engaged over time
3. Tactical Level - Specific initiatives and improvements to build a healthy, engaged community and achieve business outcomes.

At each level, you need a distinct goal and measures to attract success.

S.P.A.C.E.S. Model:

• Support: Customer service. Empower members to resolve problems for each other
• Product: Innovation, Feedback and R&D. Feedback and ideas
• Acquisition: Growth, marketing and Sales. Empower ambassadors to organise events and advocate on your behalf to increase brand awareness, SEO and market share
• Contribution: Collaboration and Crowdsourcing. Content, products and services on your platform, marketplace or social network.
• Engagement: Customer experience, retention and loyalty.? Increase retention, satisfaction and sense of belonging.
• Success: Customer success and advancement. The goal is to make customers more successful at using your product or service. Empowering them to teach each other, and help others skill up and grow.

METRICS & ATTRIBUTION

You want to be able to show if and when community was a touch point on the customer journey.

Community focus needs to prioritise the areas that are most important to your business today- Retention, Support, Acquisition, Product, and Education.

Growth Engine vs Cost Centre - the most clear-cut ROI and value is to measure new leads.

Choosing a Measurement Framework:

1. The goal you are trying to achieve
2. The measures that will tell you if you’ve achieved that goal
3. The actions you take to achieve that goal

OKRs, 4DX and V2MOM are 3 different frameworks for measuring

Community Investment Journey:

A Community life cycle is like the growth of a tree.

1. Seed - Need a lot of love and care to keep it alive
2. Growth - Starts to organically grow and engage
3. Maturity - Well established with clear norms and leadership structure
4. Pollination - Breaks out into sub-communities and they seed and start again

SEED STAGE:

Initially, the community builder must show up constantly, keep at it, fail, learn and adapt. You’ll never learn how to build a community by looking at an existing one. Successful communities look very different to how they first start out.

Every community starts off with the same challenge. You need content for members to engage with and people inside in order to motivate people to create content. A double-sided marketplace.

Narrow down the initial focus and concentrate on people who are genuinely invested.?

Do things that don’t scale. Do them until you can’t.

GROWTH STAGE:

Strategy starts to become more structured.

Layers and inner circles start to form.

New rules and standards develop and language, symbols and rituals form

Becomes less about creation and more about facilitation

MATURITY STAGE:

Operational role - Manage, moderate and support leaders.

Clear set of standards, rituals, guidelines, roles and cultural norms.

The Social Identity Cycle

Create and reinforce a set of beliefs, expressions and actions of members to adopt and engage in. A shared identity.

3 Stages of the Cycle:

1. Identification - Identifies with and attracted to social identity.
2. Takes action to participate in a community experience
3. Validation - Reward in some way - strengthens the investment and the cycle repeats.

Who Is Your Community Built For?

People: Who are we?

Purpose: What do we believe?

Participation: What do we do?

Generally, the more specific the social identity the more likely people who share that identity will have a need for a community.

Look for people who feel isolated.

Who doesn’t belong? Can’t serve everyone so exclude with empathy.

Invest in Diversity and Inclusion - you can either perpetuate the norms, but will miss out on the incredible value of having diverse voices in your community.

Every community has its own personality. This can set you apart from the alternatives.

MAPPING THE COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION JOURNEY

By mapping out your commitment curve you can lay out all the different actions you want the community members to take.

4 Levels of Participation:

1. Passive Members
2. Active Members
3. Power Members
4. Leaders

Roughly 80% of your content will be created by 20% of your community (Pareto’s Principle)

MVC - Minimal Viable Community

Hope for organic growth but plan for manual growth.

Onboarding Experience:

1. What do you want them to know?
2. What do you want them to feel?
3. What do you want them to do?

VALIDATION, REWARDS & INCENTIVES

Creating habits with rewards

External triggers keep people coming back until they form an internal trigger.

Intrinsically motivated members are a requirement for deep communities that genuinely care about the other members.

When giving someone a reward the question is:

• How does the reward make the person feel about themselves
• Does it make them feel important (was it personal and thoughtful?)
• Does it make them feel bad because they had higher expectations?
• Does it make them feel accomplished - did something specific to earn the reward?

Avoid replacing social norms (favours and other intrinsic rewards) with market norms (money or prizes) because when you bring market norms into any situation driven by social norms, the market norm tends to replace intrinsic motivation.

Reinforce the intrinsic motivations with praise, social validation and other extrinsic rewards.?

Effective Extrinsic Rewards S.N.A.P.

Status - Membership, badges

Networking - Meet and interact with the right people

Access - Mentor program, invite-only sessions or groups

Perks - Discounts, Swag

Often people join communities to solve practical problems or achieve specific goals but stay for the emotional connection.?

Come for the Utility but stay for the Unity.

We join communities to learn new skills, get answers to questions, grow our network, be entertained, get feedback and recommendations, to collaborate, work with others, fuel change, a place to vent.

Measuring Health & Engagement:

Identification: Surveys and Interviews answering statements like:

I feel like this community was built for people like me.

I identify as a member of this community

My values and beliefs align with those of the community

Validation:

I feel welcome and included in this community

I’ve learned something new in this community

This community has helped me achieve my goals

Your job as a community builder is to create experiences that draw members in, make them feel at home and provide an environment to engage in.

The 7P’s of Community Experience Design:

People. Who are we gathering?

Purpose. Why are we gathering?

Place. Where are we gathering?

Participation. What will participants do?

Policy. What are the rules and guidelines?

Promotion. How will you invite members?

Performance. What will success look and feel like?

Summary: Quite a niche-specific topic but there are universal truths. What makes a community successful is the same as a business - owning a topic in people’s minds. People look for a sense of belonging or a feeling of purpose.

1 Key Takeaway/Insight: Do things that don’t scale. Do them until you can’t.

Rating: 7/10

Author: David Spinks

Link to purchase:?https://www.amazon.com/Business-Belonging-Community-Competitive-Advantage/dp/1119766125

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?? I’m Ronan Leonard

?? Business Relations enthusiast

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