Building Community As A Service: A Primer

Happy Friday (well, it's Saturday, and feels a bit weird to call it a happy one) --

For a long time, I've wanted to organize a community of mixed/multiracial creatives. Year in and year out, this gets put on the back burner of the to-do list taking up space in my brain, and continues to nag at me. Simultaneously through the years I've helped up close or studied from afar as several founders built communities around their areas of desired impact. In most cases, the connectedness of those communities proved critical to any sort of value creation towards a larger mission. If you've read Robert D. Putnam's "Bowling Alone," then you know that the most consistent predictor for giving time and money (or in today's language, for enhancing the LTV of your customers) is involvement in community life. And if you've studied Ray Oldenburg's "The Great Good Place," then you know there are foundational best practices inherent in the success of any community space, no matter online or off.

Whether for-profit or not, B2B or DTC, the leaders I've admired in my career thus far all seem to understand the importance of cultivating, catalyzing, and connecting community. As the connected era has evolved, we've all had to augment formal education with time spent in the Internet sandbox. As I've read, watched, studied how certain community leaders move, I've taken notes and put together a sort of primer for building social community online. I can't claim it to be totally exhaustive, platform-specific, nor inclusive of the latest and greatest tactics (because they are always changing), but when founders have asked for advice I've sent along my little primer and they've usually found it helpful.

This rendition of the Friday Five is really a Saturday Six -- a little longer because I've crammed in as much of my "how to build community as a service" primer as would sensibly fit. If, as I am, you are feeling the kick in the pants to finally build that community you always wished existed... this might be a good place to start.

Step 1: Your Community Objective

Before embarking on anything else, make sure you set an objective for building community in the first place. Read Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans" at least a dozen times over. I observe a lot of upstart companies and communities who treat their social media presence like it's their organization's bulletin board, instead of the town square. Marshall Ganz' public storytelling framework provides a straightforward way to crystallize your community's role in the town square. Interview yourself to solidify your platform. What can the desired audience expect from, learn or do with your community? You shouldn't move on to the other steps until you can answer this question clearly, even when drunk. Practice IRL ;-)

A story of self: Why were you called to what you have been called to do?

• Identify a challenge you've faced. Why did you feel it was a challenge? What was so challenging about it? Why was it your challenge?
• What choice did you make to deal with the challenge? Why? Where did you get the courage – or not? Where did you get the hope – or not? How did it feel?
• What was the outcome? How did it feel, and why? What new understanding did it lead you to? What do you want to teach us? How do you want us to feel?

A story of us: What is your community's shared purpose, values, goals, experience, vision? (Together, we are...)

• Who is the “US” you will call upon to join you?
• What motivating values do they share?
• What experiences have you shared?
• How do you recognize one another?
• Who are you NOT for?

A story of now: What is the tension creating urgency for us to move forward together, and the hope to which “we” can aspire?

• What urgent challenge can we call on our community to face?
• What opposing force poses a threat to our highest values?
• What vision could we achieve if the community takes action?
• What action can we call upon the community to join us in taking?

Step 2: Your Community Context

I notice some founders/community leaders spend lots of time working out the WHAT of their message (as you should... see step #1) but then do themselves a disservice by mailing it in when it comes to everything else. WHO, WHY, WHEN, and WHERE matter just as much on the journey to community as a service. Identify and document what context is best for your segment of each social platform’s user base. Give each platform a role, think about times when your audience is likely on each platform, and why (What are they there for?). Make a detailed moments map of everything your community cares about, build a schedule of relevant conversations you will participate in, and stick to it:

• What events and cultural moments matter most in their yearly calendar?
• As relevant to your community call to action, what's their mindset for each month of the year and each day of the week?
• What are their relevant jobs-to-be-done and when do they feel these jobs most acutely?
• Where do they go to express their pains/gains/tears/fears, and when?
• People are more likely to take action toward their goals immediately following salient temporal landmarks. Each of these "fresh start" landmarks represents an opportunity to inject new habits or actions into their routine. List out all the relevant "Fresh Start" opportunities as relevant to your community call to action.

Step 3: Community Discovery

Find the 10 people who are the best representatives of the community you are serving. Not just 10 people who meet your demographic, but the 10 accounts who you think others would nominate to be the spokespeople for your community.

• What’s their personality and behavior on the platform? (Keep detailed notes of this)
• Take a look at everything they’ve posted. What are the common buckets of themes and occasions?
• What is their relevant attitude about your subject matter, at what times, and how do they talk about this on the platform?
• Who are they following? (Make a list in excel)
• Who’s posts do they like, share, comment on?
• Do they have any haters or enemies online? What makes them angry?

Follow these 10 people, comment on their posts, cheer them on, make them feel supported, share your brand beliefs and values and vision with them. Repeat this process for a few minutes everyday. You can unfollow the people from the previous day/week if you like.

Step 4: More Community Discovery

Usually when I share the above note, people get quickly overwhelmed. "How much time does this require, really?" (10 min/day.) "Can I deputize someone to do this?" (Yes, but I've seen it work best when the founder/community leader at least starts out this process themselves, first.) If you are just starting out and having trouble finding the desired "spokespeople" for your community, you can run this same process with competitors’ followers and with frequent users of hashtags that are relevant to the community you are trying to build.

• Sunday: Make one list of competitors of your brand (in this case I take competitors to mean any other brand who is competing for time/attention from your target audience), and another list of the hashtags they commonly use.
• Monday: Pick at least one item from each list and follow 10 to 100 of its followers.
• Tuesday-Saturday: Engage with your new friends! Like / comment / share / retweet when their posts align with your main message. Cheer them on. Be interested in them. Support them and make them feel seen. Make note of common hashtags they use and add these to your list.
• Expect about 30% of them will follow back (so depending on how quickly you aim to grow, it's just a numbers/funnel game) and this adds up exponentially over time!
• You can unfollow people from the previous week and restart the process. If you have more time to spend, you can also condense the process down into 1-2 day cycles instead of weekly cycles.

Step 5: Interviewing Key Opinion-Formers

Build a rolodex of micro- and nano-influencer relationships. (Keyword: relationships) Make a special list of all the people who live your brand’s values, who have social followings of 20k-200k on any one platform. Engage with these people both on and off platform. Ask them out on a date, bring them for lunch/coffee, get on the phone, let them know about what you are building and how they are relevant/inspiring/impactful towards the future you are trying to create. Leverage the basic principles of talking to humans as you involve these special people. (If you can only remember one thing, say THANK YOU for what they bring to the world.)

• Open Your Eyes. Close Your Mouth. Wherever possible, observing uninfluenced behavior can lead to great insights. Look for solution hacks - one of the best indicators that a market needs something is when people are so frustrated that they’ve tried hacking together their own solution.
• Disarm Your Biases. We all have extraordinarily acute hearing when it comes to listening for what we want to hear (confirmation bias). Also look for evidence that disconfirms your latest hunch.
• Get Stories, Not Speculation. Humans are spectacularly bad at predicting the future. It’s more effective to ask the interview subject to share a story about the past.
• Ask Open-Ended Questions. Ask ‘who,' ‘what,' ‘why,' and ‘how,' and then ask ‘why,' five more times. Steve Blank likes to end interviews with “What should I have asked you that I didn’t?” Simple and effective.
• Save Feedback-Getting Questions For The End. Ask questions about behavior, preferences, and challenges first, so that the discussion about you/your brand/the community you are building doesn’t poison or takeover the conversation.
• Avoid The ‘Magic Wand.' People often like to ask, “if money were no object what would you want?” But the reality is that it’s hard for people to forget reality. Better to let them explain their behavior, goals, and challenges. Then make it your job to find the best solution.

Step 6: Community Content Strategy

When you've gone through the above steps, then and only then it's time to start planning your content. After your preliminary days/weeks/months of participating in this community, make a list of content themes that are important to your people. Assess which of these themes your competitors “own” and which ones leave room for opportunity. (Remember what your influencers told you what they want to see more of / less of, which hashtags are commonly used amongst your community, what kind of posts get the most engagement from your target audience, etc.)

• Consider which themes your brand is most poised to provide a unique perspective on.
• Try to get your list down to 5-7 key content pillars. Make sure they are broad enough to offer a range of perspectives on a weekly basis, but specific enough that it’s clear what people can expect to see from you.
• Come up with unique names for each of these pillars. You may even want to turn each pillar name into its own hashtag.
• Focus on creating a bank of content ideas and producing content that aligns to these pillars. Consider the calendar you just made and how these pillars will fit in.
• Aim to create content that fits within these pillars that is so insightful it begs to be shared, and ask people to tag a friend who can relate.
• Sort your relevant hashtags list from step #4 in descending order of popularity (# of posts per tag). Taking the top 20 from this ordered list, make it your goal to make it “to the top” of the popular posts page for each one of these 20 tags.
• Also, come up with at least one hashtag that your brand will own, that is NOT already on your relevant hashtags list. Use it every time you post on any platform that leverages tags. Use it when you comment on other’s people’s posts too, as relevant (make it relevant).

That's it. Let me know what's missing!