Using A Community

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Scott Gould

I’m really enjoying Dan Blank’s blog at the moment. I first caught onto him through my close friend Andrew Davies at idio, and I’ve been following him for a while, but it seems these past few weeks I’ve really caught onto his writing a lot more.

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

Have you been on the receiving end of support and/or selling in a community?
Are you aware of any communities that actually grow based on a ‘selling’ mindset? (I don’t)
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

Together

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Scott Gould

It’s a concern of mine that despite all our social media, people still don’t do things together.

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

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

Photo courtesy of Jeff Bauche

Model: The 7 Levels of Participation

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Scott Gould

The above model is something I’ve been thinking about for a while – and would love to now think through with you – that aims to present some guide and scale for participation, with the goal of helping us know what level of participation to pitch for our communities or projects.

My basic assumption is that as the level of participation increases, the number of people who participate decreases. A lot of the successes, and failures, that I see not only within Social Media but community engagement in general are linked to pitching at the right level of participation:

Failure generally happens where the amount of participation is overestimated, and only a high level is provided
Successes generally happen where multiple levels of participation are provided, meaning lower and higher levels happen

Whether you’re building a social network, running a blog, doing an online campaign, cultivating a community, and so on, you must consider your levels of participation. Continue reading →

Do Talk Do – What Collaboration Looks Like

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Scott Gould

I’m on a warpath.

I’ve decided that most of the content consumed on a daily basis is the digital equivilent of frozen ready meals that get warmed and served up in 5 minutes, before being forgotten, having added no nutrition value to the body, and being dropped out into the toilet a day later in the chain of useless bodily consumption.

The irony is that I’m posting content to declare a war of sorts on content, but hear me out: today I’m beginning a collaboration project that you are all invited to.

Do Talk Do

The other day my friend Robin Dickinson said “DO-TALK-DO: continual talk without action lowers your credibility. Far better to talk about the action you took.”

When people ask what collaboration looks like, I’ve now got an answer. It’s this. Collaboration is that we do something. We talk about it’s successes and failures. Then we go and do again.

There’s twice as much doing as there is talking. And the talking is based on action, not theory.

Here’s How It’s Going to Work

I’ve been speaking to you in the comments, on Twitter recently, and face to face with many of you, about a collaboration project. About connections over community. Today it begins. This is how I see it happening to start with:

We’ve all done something. So we arrange a time to talk vision – probably on a bit conference call – along the lines of a rough agenda. If you haven’t done, don’t come.
If no one responds in the comments and on Twitter to this – then fine – I’ve clearly got it wrong. I’m not going to push it.
The aim is that we move ourselves from being content creators to those who make it happen. Goodwill and all that.
Put your name in the comments below if you’re in, with contact details.

Want more info? Like what we’re actually going to collaborate on? I don’t have it. The whole point is that this isn’t me, it’s us. And we don’t yet know where we are going.

Let it begin.

By the way, thanks to AJ Pape who inspired me no end last night with a short call where he showed me all the ideas he had ready from Like Minds. You can see them in the picture above. He’s already onboard. Thanks AJ.

How Apple Creates Suspense, Why Satisfaction Doesn’t Matter, and A Lesson From Star Wars

Posted on January 12, 2010 by Scott Gould

I spoke a while ago on the idea of what I’m calling ‘brand mystery’ – we looked at JJ Abrams’ TED Talk and Lost, and how he tells a story by suspense. He never provides the complete picture, and this is what keeps you hooked. This is contrary to what one copywriter thought when he said “every advertisiement should tell the complete story” – to which I wholeheartedly disagree. Discovering a brand, and unravelling its mysteries, is such a rich experience (and one that I’ve been enjoy since childhood) that it ties you emotionally into it for years to come. Continue reading →

The Problem With ‘The Last Tweet Of 2009′

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Scott Gould

I’ve been seeing lots of Businesses on Twitter saying “this is our last tweet of 2009″, mostly around December 22/23 – before the office closes for two weeks.

Given that Twitter is more about augmented reality than blogging (it’s even changed in some circles from ‘micro-blogging’ to ‘micro-media’), then isn’t saying “this is our last tweet of 2009″ like saying “this is our last conversation of 2009″?

Whilst you might say “this is my last blog post of 2009″, blogging isn’t the same as conversation, so when I see tweets like this, I realise there is a fundamental misunderstanding about Twitter’s use as a platform for ongoing conversation.

In my opinion, this suggests that conversation ends for special occasions, that we cease to talk to one another because it’s the New Yew, or a bank holiday. But the reality is that it is on holidays like Christmas that we talk more, so then why put Twitter away?

I faced this challenge myself on Christmas Day. Should I tweet, or not? Well, if tweeting is like work, then yes I should consider not tweeting. But if Twitter is augmenting my reality, and extending my relationships from just being those in close proximity, then why not wish Merry Christmas to people around the world through Twitter and Facebook?

Do you not use a mobile phone to text people on Christmas, or even call them? I’m not saying you don’t pay more attention to the people you’re spending the day with – but I wonder why many of us have this rather inconsistent and incongruent view.

The future is not set for less augmentation, but more. I certainly felt a few years ago that texting on Christmas day was somewhat rude, but now it’s common place. Should businesses, then, begin thinking like this too?

Perhaps you have a thought to add here?

No Man Is An Island

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Scott Gould

Then why are so many so distant from each other?

For all our technology, many families, friendships, workplaces and businesses are becoming increasingly fragmented due to the weight of responsibility, the amount of business, and sea of content that we are all drowning in.

Admittedly, the island in this photo is one I’d like to live on. But I wouldn’t want to live their forever. We want people, and we want relationship. In talking about P2P (People-to-people) we recognise that distance is not the problem to relationship that it once was, due to Social Media.

The new problem, as far as I see it, is frequency. And we we have two kinds. The good kind, and the bad kind. Continue reading →