That the Friends who comment here are like a family to me; that even though people may be thousands of miles apart with no knowledge of each other, if you give people room and allow them to shine with the light that is often brighter than your own expertise, then like minds will always come together.

Thank you all,
Scott

Question: doesn’t this just get you right back to the basics of:

• Identifying passions
• Identifying influencers
• Targeting online and offline to create word of mouth
• Delivering an exceptional product / event
• Creating multiple levels of participation within the product / event
• Providing some memorabilia / takeaway to build advocacy for next time
• Keeping the community alive

I think I’ve got myself a new framework right there?

So my task to you: boil this down to the simplest framework and let’s discus.

Back in 2003 when we started running Feedback (a youth charity attached to my church), our first event wasn’t the sell out that I had hoped. Serving gourmet coffee, fresh donuts, jazz performances, and me retelling something I’ve heard on a Tony Robbins tape, it wasn’t exactly the definition of “youth”.

In fact, it was the definition of me.

But over the course of a year, we changed as a team and became far more in touch with what the youth needed, resulting in a packed event with 350 people exactly one year later.

Fishing With A Rod

I tell this story because to start it is exemplifies what it is to go fishing with a fishing rod. When we take a fishing rod approach, we can only catch one fish a time and intensely hunt for the single best fish that we can. A good fishing trip bears with it a good story of catching that fish – you know – the one that you hold in the photo and is the length of your body if not more.

The trouble with fishing with a rod is that it’s only ever one at a time, and I’ve found that when we do this, we seek to find what we want as a provider, not what other’s want as an end user. This isn’t always the case, but it tends to be so in my experience.

Fishing With A Net

The alternative, as became as a team after a year, is to fishers who fish with a net. When you take a net, you trall in everything and anything that you can catch, and then sift through it after. It is an undiscriminating way to go about fishing – you don’t pick and choose – you fish. We started to do this when we changed to having coffee to having a bunch of cold drinks and hot drinks. Before it was “you have to the kind of fish that likes gourmet coffee”, but after it was “if you want a drink, we’ve got one for you.” You see the difference?

Sifting through it after means once you’ve pulled up the net, you understand that not everything will stick. This is fundamental to a volume or value based approach – no matter what, people will opt out of certain levels of participation with you, and that’s fine – it’s just where they want to be.

Your Leading Thoughts

We value your inputs – both your experience and your insights. Talking about Fishing Rods and Fishing Nets,

• Which are you using for your current project? Can you tell us about it and how you’re dong?
• Neither Rods or Nets are right or wrong. They are just two approaches, the second of which I find is better for community. What is your opinion here?

Photo credit.

The interview came at just the right time, as I’d written about communities in a number of recent posts, with regards to Facebook Groups, and again with regards to Warmth and Light in Church.

Thanks to Dan for conducting the interview. I gained a lot from the discussion and it’s really helped me frame some of what I was thinking.

You can watch the video of our interview here.

Your Leading Thoughts

• What points in this interview resonant the most with you?
• How would you define ‘community’?

Well firstly, phew!, finally Groups and Pages are different again and groups appear to have functionality that would make you want to use them! I don’t know about you but as a marketer and community builder, I struggled between knowing which to use for what, based on the benefits of both.

However now these new Groups have been built from the ground up with a new resolution to facilitate real world groups and communities that already exist, something that gets back to the core of Facebook’s early mission of ‘helping you connect with the people you know.’ And within this, I think there is not only opportuniy, but also it acts as a confirmation about what we’re now thinking about communities in general.

Communities are made of micro-communities

Let me take church as an example, seeing as I used it recently already to illustrate community. A church meets every Sunday for their service, which is the macro community, where all the people come together, no matter what age, demographic, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. But it isn’t the virtue of Sunday in itself that brings this community together nor holds it together. In actual fact, we find subsets of communities within this community, micro community if you will, where people exchange life on a more frequent and deeper level.

Therefore, macro community is the product of micro communities. The strength of this macro community is the strength of these micro communities – the strength of the bonds between the people in them, and the strength of the bonds that link these micro communities together.

This isn’t just a church thing. Take #LikeMinds and you’ll find we have micro communities within our macro community. Take your school, your family, your friendship groups, and so on.

What this reminds me of is this slide below from “The Real Social Network“, an exquisite and mind-shifting, a-ha moment presentation from Paul Adams at Google. It basically says that we can’t approach social networks from the point of view that we have one community, because we don’t. We have different sets of friends who we might say totally different things to. In other words, micro communities that make up our own personal macro community.

Facebook isn’t a single community

Whilst Facebook isn’t a single community, we currently have to treat it like it is. I have to send my Church updates to everyone, and my work updates to everyone. It’s just one community. And when I do share any of this content, it is quite clearly owned by me, not by anyone else.

What Facebook now appear to be doing is giving us a way to groupalise content. Remove my made up word and you’d have ‘co-owned content’ or something similar. The groups allow you to have  group photos, group tags, group emails, group documents – a space where no one is really the owner but where everything is shared.

This means, it I use the image above, I could now form a group for each of those 4 communities above, and govern or guide it accordingly.

Groups in the status feed

From my early testing, these new Groups insert the updates into the news feed for those who are following them, meaning I have a new way to keep track of information that relates to an area of my life. Previously, it was this ability that gave Facebook Pages a competitive advantage over Facebook groups. Facebook Social Plugins, however are currently still only with Pages or customised content, so Groups don’t have a weigh in there yet.

Groups are like contact groups in your email client

When I use Mail to send an email to certain teams, I can type the name of that group. Now, I can do the same with the new Facebook Groups, as well as see it in the news feed. This is a powerful move towards what The Real Social Network was talking about when it said that we don’t have one single community.

The way that I plan to use them is like I’d use this email contact group, a place to foster micro community through curation of people (not so much content.) The difference over the old format of groups is that I get notifications on all the activity. This is really lacking when it comes to Pages, but now means I can track everything in that group. Considering that for many Facebook has replaced email, and is their top communication method other than talking, it makes sense for me now to conduct work through a Facebook group that will automatically keep me up-to-date on all the activity.

The bigger changes

Facebook making this change tells me a lot about how we are changing in our knowledge economy. Facebook has become strikingly powerful at both reflecting and shaping how we think and interact. I’m interested to see how this changes us. ‘Friend’ was their first big thing, then ‘wall’, and then most powerfully with ‘like’. Whats the new verb or noun going to be now?

Your Leading Thoughts

• Do you see a use for Facebook groups? Or is it effort that you just don’t have time or interest for?
• Do you observe my same observations about macro and micro community? What has Facebook taught us about how we really approach community?

It’s a trick as old as time, and a trick that schools have been using for years. When it comes to getting people to attend the school play, there is no better way than making sure you give every kid a part – because then the whole family comes to watch them.

That’s what Old Spice did with their campaign last month. If you haven’t heard about, to save me writing all about it, you can read this post at ReadWriteWeb. The gist of it is that they created YouTube clips based on what people said on Twitter, in near-realtime fashion. You can see all the videos here. Below is one that they did to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ive3vXv-XRk

According to the guys at We Are Social, the Old Spice videos were watched 11 million times in the space of 48 hours (plus other stats here). I don’t know how much product Old Spice have shipped as a result, but they got more views that Obama’s victory speech in the same span of time, and their PR and awareness goals have no doubt been met and exceeded.

Putting The Kids In The Show

So now everyone asks “How do we do it? What was its success?” John Bell wrote a very good post on the real time nature of the campaign, John Cass wrote on its transparent inauthenticity, and Molly Flatt on the power of brand anthropomorphism. They all agree however that this isn’t something that can be replicated successfully because this is a market that rewards uniqueness just once. A clone won’t get the attention this campaign did.

For me, the takeaway lesson must be in the power of putting all the kids in the show, doing it in a real time fashion that was unique, and targeted key influencers.

Putting the kds in the show is about socialising your content. Consider threadless.com, who are a community who design and rate t-shirts by the community. Each t-shirt is always bound to have at least one customer – the person who designed it. But as their community has grown, and the average level of participation has deepened, more and more of their content has been socially created and incentives of purchasing these items has increased. People buy the t-shirts and support the company because they are emotionally invested in it, because they have co-created it.

This is the same thing I did in 2003 when I started Feedback, a youth organisation that was run by youth, for the youth. When we started out, we found it really hard to fill up our venue. Putting up posters and handing out leaflets was time consuming and largely ineffective. I remember our first event had 35 people, and we slowly increased in numbers until we jumped to 89 in March 2004 when we got a popular band from our college to perform. We jumped then again to 250 when we had our Battle of the Bands later that year.

We quickly learned that the best way to market our event and fill our venue was put people in the show who had existing followings – the same thing that Old Spice did by targeting Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Lisa Barone, etc.

Skip to Like Minds in October last year, and it was the same tactic with those who we asked to partner with us on the event. By having local companies as partners, they brought in their clients to see them perform.

This is why Social Media is so powerful. You are invested in it, because you’ve co-created it. And because you are invested in, you bring people to see it and you can’t get away from it.

Your Leading Thoughts

1. When you look at a group photo, which is the first face you look for?
2. How have you socialised content to put kids in the show?
3. Where have you seen this tactic NOT work?

Photo courtesy of Brave Heart

Last week he wrote a post that I knew I’d love the moment I saw the title: “You Don’t Sell To A Community. You Support A Community“. You guys know I love a good strap line, especially when there’s aliteration. The great thing was that the post delivered.

It’s hard to pick a central quote (you can guess what the post was about), as it was one of those almost poetic pieces where each paragraph builds incrementally on the previous one, but perhaps the best part to me is this very accurate description of the latest marketing fad which is “build community”:

A brand should be careful about approaching social media as a sales funnel: to establish connections, build ‘trust,’ encourage a ‘community,’ and then market products and services to them. That’s not a community strategy, that is a marketing plan. And there is a difference.

This really rings home because recently I was having a leadership discussion in a venture that I’m involved in, and the painful point came up that whilst I was trying to explain we needed to build community in order to serve the community, the reality was that we were more interested in building the community in order to serve ourselves.

Turning it around is hard – we’re still in the process of doing it – and I’m learning some key lessons as I go.

Dan goes on to say that “building a community” for business is furthermore a hard and an expensive thing to do. It seems a stock answer at the moment to tell publishers in particular that they should “build community”, but I watch the people who say it and often they have never built one themselves. Dan actually argues that you don’t build them anyway – they already exist, and you help it grow.

My Experience with Community

I’ve nurtured many a community in the last 13 years that I’ve been ‘doing this’, but I think my most pertinent example would come from Like Minds.

I’ve said many times that my original intention for Like Minds was to show the local businesses that I was good at marketing, so that they’d hire me as a consultant. I was desperate to be accepted (many of the people who support me now didn’t back then), and I thought that if I could pull off a good event, they’d see.

After the success of the first Like Minds in October 09, a community – a tribe – was born in a day, but I still in mind saw that as a means to an end for getting work. Sure, I supported the community, but I didn’t see it as being a place that would be my main focus and income. I wasn’t selling to them – it’s important to clarify that – but I did see them as a way for me to secure more consulting.

It wasn’t until April this year that I realised how dearly I loved the community that was growing, and that if I focussed on serving that community, that would be far more fulfilling and rewarding. The irony is since I made that decision to not pursue consulting, consulting work has started to come in, and I turn a lot of it down in order to focus more fully on Like Minds because that’s where I’m seeing people really effected, which has always been my aim in the beginning anyway.

When a community really clicks (which I’ve been a part of many times), you know there’s no way that you can sell to them anyway. The things that they need from you, they’ll get without you blowing your horn, and you won’t given them anything but the things they need anyway, even if it’s not your thing that they need.

Your Experience with Community

1. Have you been on the receiving end of support and/or selling in a community?
2. Are you aware of any communities that actually grow based on a ‘selling’ mindset? (I don’t)
3. If supporting is what you do, how have you monetized that if you are nurturing a community?

Photo of Like Minds 2010 courtesy of Paul Clarke

One of the main things that helped with me this is a post by Dan Blank called “Creating Interest vs Providing Solutions” from late last year. Dan says a number of pertinent things in this post, my favourite being:

If you can’t properly monetize 18 million unique visitors a month, how will another 5 million help clarify the way forward?

The point is that charging for interest is different to charging for a solution. Dan argues that many B2Bs, and publishers in particular, are thinking very narrowly about what their real asset is, and desperately trying to cling onto it, rather than actually start from the users point of view and explore what needs they really have around their interests:

Even in the cases where pay walls will work, it is not a complete solution, it is just one revenue stream. And in all likelihood, it is not one that will restore revenue and profits to the levels being lost by print.

Ads & Sponsorships are one model, but getting customers to pay you is another. If you rely solely on ads & sponsorships, how many page views is enough for your market? How many webinar sign-ups? How much growth can you garner year after year?

To differentiate your revenue streams, you may want to consider developing products that provide direct solutions. What service do you provide – could you provide- that people couldn’t live without?

Dan then linked to an exceptional presentation by David Cushman, called “a new era for specialist media.” Any regular here will find the ideas similar to our discussions on spreadability and people-to-people, but it is most certainly worth a look.

[slideshare id=2509580&doc=sipakeynotedc-091116051033-phpapp02]

All of this discussion makes me think again about the need for Social Media to be useful. And by useful I don’t mean useful for you, I mean useful for your users and/or community. We really need to understand them, with quantitive and qualitative research, and deliver what lifts restrictions for them – what enables them to do what they previously could not do.

For a really good case study on this, watch Yann Gourvennec’s Insight at Like Minds. His work as the Head of Digital and Internet at Orange Business Services is very, very inspiring.

Your Leading Thoughts

• Are you a B2B player in Social Media? If so, are you providing a solution?
• How do we begin to think ‘solution’, because I think at the moment we are very caught up with interest over solution.
• How do you communicate solutions, without making everything a sales pitch?

Words like community, team, collaboration, relational, participatory, social – they are all over Twitter, but then when you share these links or comment on these posts, do you get a reply? When you ask people not what they say about social media, but if they are doing social media, how many are building connections and really collaborating?

The truth is that working together is hard.

It’s hard because we grow up today in a such a me-focussed world and live such me-focussed lives that the preference of others and putting others first that is required for team work doesn’t come easily.

Case in point: communication. Every Sunday at church, we have a team who handle the sound, the lighting and the audio/video content. They all link into each other, yet when Sunday comes and they are working together, I was rarely hearing them talk to each other, and as such, the whole Sunday experienced suffered.

Why was this? Because they were used to living in their own minds and focussing on their own angle, that they were almost unaware of the others around who needed their support and communication. Now that I’m teaching them communication and helping them see the need for the big picture and to give of themselves to each other, they are working far more powerfully as a team.

Malcolm Gladwell writes some very interesting stuff about this – particular in the area of focus – in his book Blink (affiliate link.) With focus, we tend to close off what’s going around and zoom in onto one thing. And I think that technology has heightened this ability within us – for good and for bad. Think about the hundreds of millions of knowledge workers who spend all day with computers, not uttering a world as they live inside their head and shift digital paper. What they are getting better at is having a tight focus. What they are getting worse at is looking up.

In order to get on together we need to look up. We need to prefer one another. Valuing the person in front of us. I’m shocked by how much ego I still see – people clamoring for the attention, to give their point of view, to ensure they are heard and that they get the credit. You know what I decided? I’m going to give the credit rather than get the credit.

Your Leading Thoughts

1. When did you learn to really work together? What was the time that switch you from being me-focussed to we-focussed?
2. If you could give one tip to people that would help them become team players, what would it be?

Photo courtesy of Jeff Bauche

It’s far more rewarding, effective and exciting to be the king-maker, than trying to put yourself on the throne all the time. Ego is hard work, and trying to make yourself king is tiring. I’ve tried it before, and not only did I find it exhausting, but I found I wasn’t helping anyone else but myself.

You know how it is when someone is trying to be king – the ego casts a shadow a mile long, right? Not always. It can be very subtle. In fact, I find pretty much the whole of the Twitter community are trying to be kings. There’s nothing wrong with that, but doesn’t all this ‘share’ talk annoy you when the ones who shout ‘share’ really mean ‘share me?’

Those who are trying to be kings are always:

• Trying to get attention, rather than give it
• Trying to get traffic, than send it
• Trying to get comments, rather than give them
• Trying to sell, rather than buying
• Trying to build the house, rather than build the hostel

The difference between these people, and king-makers, is that king-makers get attention, by giving it, and so on.

Of course some people are kings. But the best kings were king-makers first - and will always be king-makers – because these are the ones that better the country they lead.

Your Leading Thoughts

Every regular at this blog that comments aren’t self proclaimed – I know you all. So my question is:

• Are you a king-maker. If yes, or if no, why?
• If you’re not, shouldn’t you be?

Image courtesy of Timothy K Hamilton.