Over on LinkedIn, I got into, let’s call it, a disagreement with Richard Millington about the phrase “community everywhere”, which was the topic of a previous post: Don't let "community everywhere" distract you. Like Twitter, LinkedIn turns out to be a poor venue for this sort of conversation. It’s a discussion that requires nuance that’s hard to fit into 1,250 characters. So here we are.
I guess I should start by stating my bias. I have scars from being a community manager at Stack Overflow when a few people with a lot of Twitter followers somehow gained more influence over the company than anyone in the community or, indeed, the community team itself. Social media sites have tremendous value connecting people around the world, but they tend to create the illusion of human connection.[1] So I might be overly skeptical of the idea that we should redefine “community” to include Twitter in particular.
There’s a business parable drawn from The Hedgehog and the Fox that classifies strategies into flexible foxes who pursue many paths and highly focused hedgehogs who know just one way. In this analogy, constructing community platform[2] is the hedgehog. As Richard explains it, community everywhere is more like a fox:
To me [community everywhere] means uncovering where people prefer to satisfy needs which are relevant to an organisation’s goals - and making sure you satisfy those needs on that channel.
Before I make a case for a single platform, I’d like to steel man the other option. I spent a year as a developer advocate at EDB. We didn’t have an online community, but we did have a lot of employees active the PostgreSQL community.[3] We made moves toward getting community contributions to our documentation, but our contributions mostly came from employees. I had ambitions of setting up a community forum for EDB that never even reached the proposal stage.
Maybe for EDB a centralized community doesn’t make much sense. The closest we had were customers who used our documentation. It’s easy to show there wasn’t much of a community there: when we made changes, nobody objected. Our audience didn’t engage with us beyond taking site surveys and coming to conferences that EDB sponsored. Building our own community platform would have required substantially more investment than we could afford with no guarantee of success. We were much better off integrating with the PostgreSQL community. In any case, the close connection between the company and the open source project has always been a selling point.
One way to look at the community landscape is to imagine all the organizations in the world and divide them into those that would clearly benefit from a centralized community and those that probably would not benefit. Some examples:
| Organization | Could an online community work? |
|---|---|
| Towing company | No |
| Neighborhood association | Yes |
| Empanada restaurant | No |
| Newspaper | Yes |
| Dog trainer | Yes |
| General Contractor | No |
Feel free to mentally fill in more examples. Optimistically half my examples could use their own community space. The other half aren’t regularly interacting with enough people (beyond simple transactions) to build a viable community. Likely the actual rate is much lower because it was easier for me to think of organizations that fit the bill. It’s probably lower still when accounting for people who don’t have an interest in online communities.[4]
Even among those that could benefit, the cost of investing in a community might never be recouped. Communities can be expensive and it’s not always easy to value them. If a random organization asked me to advise them on a community strategy, “community everywhere” seems a pretty good default. For most companies, it’s better to find community than to build it.
People in community interact
As a community consultant who specializes in Discourse, I’m predisposed to build rather than find community. My universe of clients encompasses those that have already started a centralized community and rarely anything beyond that. I left EDB, in part, because communities such as College Confidential and Stack Exchange better fit my strengths and preferences. Summarizing to a single adjective, I’m looking for organic communities.
Here’s a statement from the “Community Everywhere” article that I agree with:
We shouldn’t be trying to drive all engagement to a single website, we should be trying to nurture and support the entire ecosystem regardless of where it takes place.
The catch is that ecosystems are, by definition, interconnected. The article’s takeaway chart suggests tools such as:
- newsletters
- CRM systems
- learning systems
- social media
- blogs
- private groups
- community platforms
Defining the community/ecosystem broadly requires this variety of systems. Prospects, satisfied customers and superfans simply interact with a company in different ways. One might even say that as a rule these constituencies[5] connect with each other only by happenstance. Frequently they don’t even know that the other groups exist. Their connection is to the brand, not each other. No interaction? Not a community nor, strictly speaking, an ecosystem.
Expanding a community organically
What annoys me about this whole thing is that at least some of these groups could benefit from rubbing shoulders. Instead of sequestering learners in online courses, why not empower your superfans to create tutorials? Creating content for newsletters can be labor-intensive, so why not send out a summary of popular discussions from the forum? Make your community a selling point for prospects and leads. Hard to beat the return on investment of leveraging the talents of volunteers.
Finding where your people congregate and meeting them there doesn’t end the process. If you are going to have a community, you need to pull them together. As Alex Komoroske puts it, you platform must coevolve with the ecosystem:
You might still use several tools of interaction, but they must bring diverse people together in order to get the most out of a community.
At College Confidential, we invested in a school directory. Our community barely looked at it—other sites had better tools. Ideally we’d have used our community to build a better product that they would be excited to use. Instead of relying on expensive data sources that anyone can build a site around, we should have found ways for our members to contribute to our database. That would have been a unique product that nobody else could duplicate.[6]
Platforms that respond to their ecosystem create a unique moat for the companies that own them. That’s how Stack Overflow became a billion dollar company. Creating a community of developers takes years and that means it can retain value even when mismanaged.
Barriers to organic communities
On my first visit to Stack Overflow HQ as a new community manager, I was shown the sales floor. “We don’t bother them,” my tour guide told me, “They are too busy making money.” It seemed a little odd at the time since the product they were selling was the Stack Overflow community[7] but I figured they had been properly trained in how to sell the product. Years later I got a chance to do a training session with sales people and I discovered they had almost no idea of the value of the community. It was little more than the key to open the door for their sales pitch.
Think about how the incentives line up. Every moment a sales person spends interacting with the community is a moment they aren’t on the phone drumming up business. If your job is sending out a newsletter every week, what will your manager think if they find out you outsourced the job to volunteers? Few companies have vital communities, so most people don’t know how to interact with a community as a part of their job. They go about business the way they would at pervious companies without a community. Unless the entire organization values their community, it will quickly cease to be a priority.
Leadership also fears losing control over a community that pushes back. It’s much easier to market to a passive audience than to interact with people who expect their input to be heard. That’s why executives tend to dismiss critics in their community as “freeloaders” or “entitled” rather than listen and risk changing their way of doing business.
An alternative view of the trends in community platforms
I said above that “community everywhere” is a fox-type strategy when considering the variety of places it takes practitioners. Over time, however, specialization turn the strategy into a collection of hedgehogs. Nobody can stay abreast of all those places where people congregate, much less excel at the wide range of interactions those platforms demand. So you find someone we enjoys social media and assign them to reach your community on social media. Someone else takes the newsletter and the blog. Obviously sales takes over the CRM. Initially there is crossover between these teams, but as people gain experience, there’s no real need to interact with each other. Pretty soon you don’t have “community everywhere”. You have a fairly traditional organization that pretends to focus on “community”.
If you thinking “That won’t happen to us! We have a community-focused culture.” I’m afraid Conway’s law says otherwise. Each division will adopt their own definition of “community” to emphasize their domain. That’s great way to transform “community everywhere” into “community nowhere”. Or, less uncharitably, maintain silos between constituencies rather than building up an ecosystem.
Gartner reports “a 74% jump from 2022 to 2023 in client inquiries about customer communities”. It’s fair to say community professionals have sold corporations on the value of community. What I worry about is that we’ve failed to explain the cost. Like all true magic, community-building requires sacrifice. In order to make the most of a customer community, businesses need to respond to their creation. It doesn’t mean that the community may dictate how a company operates. Rather companies that claim to care about community must build that value into their whole culture from CEO to management to contributors. If they fail to do that, their constituencies will detect hypocrisy and fade away.
I did a whole talk on the psychological tricks used by Stack Overflow for what it’s worth. ↩︎
See my analysis of Board Game Geek, for instance. ↩︎
Almost entirely consisting of mailing lists, which are sometimes overlooked as a platform for communities. ↩︎
The pandemic created an excellent natural experiment. Some organizations built lasting online communities, but many reverted to pre-pandemic behavior as soon as possible. ↩︎
I’m grateful to Ana Hevesi’s article " Stop wasting time on ‘community’ for using this word that neatly defines the sort of groups I’m talking about. ↩︎
It’s not too late, by the way! I’m working as a consultant with College Confidential and that’s one of the ideas we’re tossing around. ↩︎
This was during the Careers 2.0 era when Stack Overflow though they would make money by connecting Stack Overflow contributors with hiring managers. ↩︎
