Reconciling Community and Business
By: Gaetan De Dietrich
Tags: Community Management, Coliving, Community, Community Engagement, Experience Design

Community is everywhere these days, from your IPO filings to your farmed vegetables. While some have abused the term unashamed, a growing number of organisations have successfully tended to their communities in a conscious and tangible way, and reaped great benefits from it.

Community is still to this day, one of the most effective form of social organisation humanity has created. Harnessing it’s influence for your business can be highly rewarding: lower Customer Acquisition Costs, increased retention, lower cost of service and improved lifetime value, to name a few. But creating a community around your brand is not a straight-forward affair, especially when you’re building one from scratch.

Having been on the fascinating journey of finding how to apply community principles to the world of business; I thought I’d share some of the things I am grateful to have picked up along the way from experts, brilliant community managers and many many trials.

Community principles for business:

Community can’t be sold as a service

Community requires co-creation from members

Community is fostered not designed

To build Community focus on creating relationships

Community needs stories

The soft part is the hard part

Accounting for its many forms and intensity levels, I find community best defined as: one of the (highest) form of relatedness between humans; where people who are unrelated, will decide devoid of direct reward, to become accountable for the well-being of each other.

More than an outcome, community is a state of mind. We can build structures around it, peg valuations against it, but its core is based on the relationships that are created between its members. As valuable as it is elusive, community is a perfect example of the expression the soft part is the hard part.

The main point of friction when adopting a community mindset in business comes the fact that community stretches the the traditional action-reward framework to the brink.

All of businesses have been built on the capitalist concept of a voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. I do A’ and therefore I get X, at time T* (I buy A’ from a merchant, get the product X I wanted, upon delivery at T*). With community thinking when I do A’, I can get anything from A to Z in return, at T? — and it shouldn’t matter as long as I contribute.

Community places more value on engagement than outcome. This is radical difference with business: the success of a customer interaction is measured differently. When you are building community you are not looking for an immediate direct reward (profits, sales, margins) you are simply trying to create engagement.

Community is a long-tailed game, there are no quick wins. That’s the mercantile way, and it clashes with the continued trust a group needs to form. Remember: you are trying to harness the power of a group that has formed around your product, not appeal to the “economic” man in each one of us. This takes a certain level of unlearning and time.

Some of the principles that have guided me:

Community can’t be sold as a service

You can’t buy the service of being part of a community, money can only grant you exposure. Unless I take active steps to become part of it, I will be a bystander, not a community member. If you can buy your way into belonging to the group, you don’t have a community, you have a club, a customer base or an interest group etc…

Community building requires generating active engagement from members. The same way students are not the consumers of their education but the product of it, community member are not entitled to belonging or getting a certificate — becoming part of a community takes accountability and commitment.

Accountability here is the willingness to accept your part of responsibility in the well-being of the whole; commitment is the willingness to care for the well-being of each, with no expectation of return and not conditional on another’s action. These two concepts are the cornerstone of community. And the reasons why your community will live best next to your business, and not directly subject to its objectives. You are looking for altruism between your customers, don’t go pressing it for results like a product line should be.

Community requires co-creation from members

Being part of a community entails shifting our mentality from consuming to co-creating.

There is nothing passive about community, you are entitled to nothing more than being given a chance of being part of the group. Being able to contribute is your reward. The underlying source of motivation of the community is helping each other. Community has no room for hierarchy or entitlement, people are the actors and audience all at the same time.

In a community, the people should own the experience, no matter who is in charge. People best create which that they own.

The essence of community building for business is to create structures for belonging that are centred around your product, be ready for those not to be picture perfect.

By building your community around your business you discover and create the means for engaging people with your product — in a way that makes them feel like its theirs. Dissent, disagreements and conflict are part of the process, do not fear or try to muffle disharmony.

If it ain’t a little ugly, it ain’t human.

You will probably witness questionable behaviour between members or even with your product. It’s natural. As a community leader, the first thing you should do is back-off; actively do nothing.

You demonstrate that commitment by trusting it to solve its problems, don’t go rushing in whenever it feels “off brand”. Community leadership is not monitoring. You will of course stay vigilant and step in when the security or integrity of the members or the customer experience is at risk.

Community is fostered not designed

The most pro-active you can be in creating a community is encouraging the spirit of it.

The moment you try to push towards an outcome, no matter how good you think it would do, you veer off community and into politics. Leading a community means creating an environment where people lead themselves. You take up an active role, but a modest one.

Let go of the idea that community needs steering. It needs opportunities for members to engage, the steering happens on its own.

You might be worried the community is not going in the direction you want, but that’s mostly your insecurities as a community leader popping up. You trust a plant to find the sun on its own. You can place a stake in its soil to provide it with support, in a way that fits your growing objectives, but you wouldn’t think of shaping exactly how it grows its foliage and flowers. Same goes with communities of people.

What gives power to your community is leading the imagination and sense of authorship of your members, through a process of engagement, not explanation or demonstration. Remember: you want to produce a feeling of co-ownership around how people experience your product.

To build Community focus on creating relationships

Building community is essentially about expanding the depth and reach of the relationships between your users.

It’s when we gather that we draw conclusions about the community we live in. Keep the focus of your user engagement unequivocally around facilitating relationships. At community events, décor and context are supporting acts, showcasing the invitees is the main show. As a community leader, focus on creating this engagement between people, and be consistent. Take all opportunities to get your users to know more about each other. The community experiences you create must showcase, in themselves, the level of relationships you wish to see grow between members. Community building relies on leadership by example.

Sometimes fostering relationships can feel unnatural, and that’s ok. Leadership is the art of knowing what not to compromise on, here it’s relationship-building. Don’t hesitate to use kind and generous authority to create serendipity.

Always aim to empower others, not yourself or your business. The pressures to deliver visible results or meet your “business requirements” can hamper the trust the community puts in you. Set-up a conceptual “China Wall” between pushing sales and fostering relationships between members, and hold steadfast. Community leadership is not a marketing exercise. Community leadership is servant leadership.

Community needs stories

Size matters. The tightest bonds will form with a group of up to 6. At 12 you’ve lost intimacy. At 30 it’s a band of smaller sub-groups.

Beyond that there is no chance the group can bond without the glue provided by narratives about what we are doing together. To grow beyond walls, communities need a combination of narratives set around:

a shared identity built on a common and moral purpose,

the reciprocity of obligations within the group,

and a link from individual actions to the well-being of the group, to show it’s done with purpose

Tell the stories of your community at each level: intimate (6), familiar (12–30) and remote (>30). This helps crystallise the idea of bigger than self, a core of community at any level. It’s important for members of a community to know that others like them are out there looking to create something similar. Stories tell us how to belong.

Community is like porn

Community is hard to measure, but like porn, you know it when you see it.

And that’s when, what are essentially strangers, start helping each other. (That’s also where the comparison with porn ends). Actively building your community of users helps not only build a relevant offering, it is also one of the most rewarding things to watch grow in itself. Knowing that every step you take creates the possibility of a better future, where people care more for each other. One step-at-a-time.

Voilà, some lessons learnt about the possibility of community. I hope this will help spark off some thinking about how community can help your business. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the many thinkers and doers that have shaped these thoughts and would love to hear yours in comments 🙏🏽

Please feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin

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