This week in community building — Issue 73

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Bring In The Social… FinTech Is Getting Wavy!

Marie Dollé

"There's a cultural generalization that talking about money should be taboo, but the reality is that the topic of finance fires up curiosity and conversation. Social dynamics shake up and accentuate interactions around money in younger generations between friends or within communities. Fintech, which has been witnessing this social upheaval in recent years, now offers new community experiences."

We Were Missing the Personal Touch

Shobeir Mazinani

I argue that obsession with personalization is not enough. There are still three missing elements.

1. The personalization machine doesn’t take the need for positive interactions with a human being into consideration. We are slightly happier when we have a good interaction (I really like your outfit!).
2. The personalization machine doesn’t prioritize the users’ personal growth. It almost always chooses today’s sales over a long-term return. Take algorithms that try to solve the multi-arm bandit problem. They will prioritize (over time) the option that maximizes the immediate response (open-rates of your email marketing campaign). To be clear, this is not about the algorithm as much as it is about the objectives that we, the data scientists and business owners, set for these machines.
3. You don’t have a sense of community, so you become a cultist! I hypothesize that one of the reasons that we have seen an increase in the polarization of society is the lack of a true sense of community. While we have connected people more than ever, people are missing out on the benefits of being part of a community.

? This week Clubhouse gets its own section!

• Clubhouse’s Inevitability — Stratechery
• Clubhouse Is Suggesting Users Invite Their Drug Dealers and Therapists — One Zero
• In defense of blocking on Clubhouse — Casey Newton
• You’ve been invited to Clubhouse. Your privacy hasn’t. — Vox
• Clubhouse in China: Is the data safe? — Stanford
• EP81: How Clubhouse is Affecting Community w/ UiPath — The Community Corner ??

?? Events

• Building a community-first product - Q&A with Kim Johnson (Geneva Chat, Glossier) — FemStreet
• Rosieland Adventure - come learn about modern community building! ??

More community articles:

• The Great Unbundling — Anne Helen Petersen
• The terrible task of documenting abuse — Tracy Chou, Block Party
• Online Community Governance: Six Case Studies — Howard Rheingold
• Should I Measure NPS Specifically In My Support Community? — Adrian Speyer
• How to Use Slack Effectively — Sam Corcos
• An Atlanta Neighborhood Will Finally Own Property as a Community—Adina Solomon
• The Signals Research — New Public
• Organising Communities: Identiyfing, connecting and facilitating — Peter Staal, Kirsten Wagenaar ??
• What Tristan Lombard teaches us about community building — Simon Tomes
• How can we calculate or prove the ROI (Return On Investment) on community? — Carmen Taubman
• The Decade of Internet Communities — Rex Woodbury
• Owned Community Matrix for Creators — Peter Yang
• The Rise of the Community Department — Lisa Xu
• Migrating Our Community from Slack to Discord: Tips & Lessons Learned — Patrick Woods
• Community-Led Growth: The Product-Led Growth Expansion Pack — Corrine Marie Riley
• Supercharging Communities Through Ownership — Ian Vanagas
• The steps to getting your community off to a flying start — Peter Staal

?? Podcasts

• Human-Centric Operations and Metrics with Sophia Vargas — CHAOSS
• Building Member Habits and Becoming Indistractible with Nir Eyal — Masters of Community
• Episode 046 - Green fielding, Growth and Maturing Community - What is Your Engagement Strategy — Peers Over Beers
• Online Community Governance: Six Case Studies | Howard Rheingold on Patreon
• How to design engagement triggers for your new community — Wes Kao
• Learning in Public with Anna Gat and Anne-Laure Le Cunff — Venture Stories

?? Tools

• Skool — Like Facebook groups, but better. ?????♀?
• Virtual Venue by Mixily — Host custom video gatherings right in your website