Did You Cripple Your Community?

Do SMART objectives drive your community? They're really crippling it.

Business communities have a terrible failure rate. Your objectives are a huge part of the problem. You’re forced to guide your community towards those objectives.

What happens when your community wants to run in a different direction? Do you stop them and risk losing the community? Or let them and risk your job?*

If you’re a volunteer running a community, you would help and encourage your community to go in different directions. You could see what works, then go with that. ‘Did a Facebook group not work? No matter, lets arrange to meet’.

So few business communities survive against those run by volunteers. You can’t compete against a community whose objective is “Lets be awesome”

Volunteers have nothing to lose and no objectives to meet. They go where their community can go. It’s why they grow so fast and so big.

* the answer is to change your company to benefit from where the community wants to go, but so few community managers have the power.