Month: May 2018

At its most successful, what is your brand community going to become?

Think bigger than you do today. Think about the ultimate role it’s going to play in the lives of
your members. Think about the number of people it’s going to serve. Think about the different ways it’s going to help your organization.

Don’t be afraid to be incredibly ambitious. Ambition can mean different things

It can mean doubling down on what you have, it can mean expansion, it can mean entirely rethinking what community is to your organization.

Last week, I listened to two people argue about which platform they should use to build their community.

Should they use Slack or Discord?

Today, most of their audience is on Slack. Tomorrow it might be Discord…at least for a while. Within 18 to 36 months, it will be something else.

Chasing after your audience from one platform to the next is an expensive, wasteful, approach to community building. A far better approach is to invest those same resources in building a strong sense of community.

The engagement trap is very real, it’s very dangerous, and most of us are caught in it.

But engagement itself isn’t bad. The problem is when:

a) You align your efforts to drive the most engagement.

b) Engagement is all your colleagues understand about building community.

In a perfect world, you would ignore engagement metrics entirely and focus on the outcomes of this engagement (i.e. if engagement drives more loyalty, satisfaction, leads, search traffic etc…you would measure those things instead of engagement).