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Speaking this week to community managers in Israel, one idea struck a chord; asset-based community development.
It’s the most important concept in community organizing you probably haven’t heard of.
ABCD is when a community organizer (builder, manager) stops treating communities as a group with a collective problem to solve and starts treating the community as a group with countless opportunities for growth.
Communities are a goldmine for innovation and insights, but you need to get the strategy right. Insights don’t appear by chance, they appear after a successful execution of your community strategy.
You can use a community to directly solicit ideas, gather feedback, identify bugs, track sentiment, identify popular trends, and refine ideas through getting early feedback (content, possible new features, and potential product changes).
More than any other goal, innovation requires internal alliances (and strong internal relationships) to realize the value.
An online community is a group of people who have built relationships around a strong common interest and primarily use the internet to communicate with one another.
Most companies using open-source community software end up with a community site which doesn’t look great.
Either they display a long list of discussions like BoingBoing or do some development work like Marvel.
Both are ok, but they miss out on the opportunity to spend a little more money developing something that looks as good as most enterprise platforms out there today.
Last week, Publicis announced Marcel. Marcel is an AI-tool (or bot?) that will connect colleagues around the world and allow for search of content throughout systems among 80,000 employees. The project will be funded by pulling up to $2m in spending from award shows for a year.
I spent two weeks in San Francisco interviewing 20+ community professionals from companies big and small. They split into two separate groups.
Group one were largely from the start-up sector. They had a strong level of internal support for the community. The CEO believed community was important and core principles trickled down. Most CEOs in this sector were more worried about sustaining attention than profit. Let’s call these the ‘blind faithers’. They trust the community is essential to relationships and keeping an audience’s attention.
Continuing from online community strategy.
Let’s imagine your community is to improve customer satisfaction (or customer success).
Your objectives first are to establish what behavior would drive that success. These are the behaviors your entire community is designed to facilitate.
Benchmarks from other organizations don’t usually tell you how you’re doing, they only tell you what’s possible.
If you want a 100% accepted solution rate to every question, that’s not possible (without removing the questions which don’t get a solution, but I digress).
We’ve been involved in plenty of recruitment of community professionals for clients recently.
Here’s a simple tip, build a profile of the kind of person that would be the perfect fit (or kinds of people) long before you need somebody.
Now go out and attend events (Lithium Linc, CMX, Community Roundtable, Jiveworld, OCTribe, Community Breakfasts etc) and begin meeting people. Yes, you might know most of what’s discussed already, but the connections are invaluable.
