Month: September 2018

In The Indispensable Community, I explain the only communities which thrive in the long term are those which are truly indispensable to their brands and their members.

It’s incredibly hard to build a community that offers members something they find absolutely necessary and would struggle to get elsewhere (and you need both). Yet it’s the only way your community can thrive today.

If you’re wondering why your community doesn’t seem ‘sticky’ (why so few people stick around), this is it.

Last week StarlingBank announced they were closing their brand community.

“We had hoped the forum would be a place where customers could openly discuss with each other questions they may have about our app. In reality, however, we’ve found that a small but vocal minority of forum members have had unrealistic expectations of what it is for. In addition, the conversations that take place there often expose potentially sensitive customer information.”

A lot of communities have closed down in the past few years because of similar complaints.

Metal detectives trawl a patch of land, dig up anything that beeps, and then look to see if any of it was valuable.

Archeologists, however, know they’re looking for something valuable. They research where the ancient battle (probably) took place and then go looking for the arrowheads.

Too often community work is more similar to metal detecting than archeology.

Community idealists tend to struggle.

They tend to sit in frustrated, isolated, silos at the bottom of the organizational chart.

They often feel they need to protect the community from the evil, capitalist, demands of their colleagues.

They spend their time trying to keep the community healthy, engaged, and happy.

The biggest reason why most communities aren’t indispensable is most community managers aren’t doing any of the work which makes communities indispensable.

If you were to make a list of all the tasks you’re doing today, it would probably include activities like:

I believe everyone building a community today should work to become indispensable to the organizations they work for.

But it’s hard to do this alone. You need help from people who have been there and done it. You need access to data and persuasive arguments to show what works.

Therefore this week I’d like to invite you to join an indispensable-only community.

I’m incredibly excited to announce the launch today of my second book; The Indispensable Community – Why Some Brand Communities Thrive When Others Perish.

If you’ve ever struggled to explain the value of your community, if you’re not sure how to get the best results from your community, or your members aren’t doing what you need, you need to buy this book.

You can constantly tweak the titles of member posts to attract better SEO traffic.

“iPhone problem”