Month: July 2018

Today we’re launching a database where you can explore 1300+ examples of successful brand communities and share your own efforts.

Getting good community examples has always been a challenge. Many people work in isolated silos with no ability to see what others like themselves are working on. For the past 18 months, we’ve been gathering data, cleaning data, and working to find a way to display the best brand communities on the web.

The community sends remarkable stories and case studies to the PR team. The PR team promotes the stories which drives more people back to the community. This generates more remarkable stories to share with the PR team.

The community sends leads to the sales team. The sales team send prospects/new customers to the community. This creates a bigger community which generates more leads to the sales team.

A potential client explained they would have to use a community platform neither of us liked because it was part of a CMS package they had just agreed to use.

Another noted their staff wouldn’t be allowed to participate in a community and they couldn’t let members talk about some of the most controversial product topics.

It’s incredibly tempting to agree to concessions like these to move a project forward. Often they’re presented as immovable facts which are impossible to change. But these are community-killing compromises. They will always come back to haunt you.

Most established communities have gone through a kill zone.

The kill zone is the time between when the community is so young, cheap, and full of potential it’s not worth killing and when it’s proven itself indispensable. It’s typically when the community grows from a cost of less than $500 per day to more than $1k per day.

Once the community gets serious investment, it needs to show clear impact. The time it takes to show impact is the kill zone.

…when there is an overwhelming demand for one.

Most organizations launch their community far too early. They stagger along for years without ever reaching a critical mass of people. You don’t need a big bang launch, but you do need a decent pop. You need to launch and quickly get to a few hundred people within a few weeks. These people should be passionate about the community concept already.

My wife and I spent the past few weeks at the World Cup in Russia.

Players might take home a trophy, but the real winners are fans. Not all the fans mind, but those who go home feeling a stronger sense of pride, who made new friends, who feel an integral part of the group.

This isn’t just true for football (or, sigh, soccer), but for any kind of in-person community events.

Once a brand community starts to really grow, the number of high-quality interactions shrinks.

Newcomers with less experience, passion, or commitment sign up in droves. They skew the questions towards newcomer issues. This results in top members leaving, followed by the next bunch and so forth.

This is sometimes known as the evaporative-cooling effect.