In 2008, I was fortunate enough to complete a 3-month internship with Seth Godin in New York.
Before the internship, I had read almost all of his books. But even that didn’t prepare me for the clarity he sought in his thinking.
In the world of Seth, you didn’t utter sentences like:
“We’re going to launch a community to attract customers to engage with each other, share knowledge, and become more loyal to the brand”
Because Seth would ask questions like:
What do we mean by ‘community’? Who’s it for and who’s it not for?
What does ‘engage’ mean here?
What knowledge will they share? How will they share that knowledge?
What do you mean by ‘launch ’?
When will you ship?
Who are the first 10 people you will tell about the community?
Why will this listen to you?
Do they trust you?
Will they tell their friends? Why?
Why can’t competitors do this quicker/cheaper/better?
Why will this make them more loyal to the brand?
Note: You can find the full 14 questions I recall here.
At the time, my answer to most of these questions was “ummm….”
But the real lesson isn’t about using the right words. It’s about clarity of thinking.
It’s about thinking through the entire plan and knowing exactly how and why something will happen.
And it’s this clarity of thinking which has become embedded in how we think about and teach community strategy.
Note: Final week to sign up for our Strategic Community Management Course.
Most Community Strategies Hide Behind Vague Terminology
Here’s a simple principle:
If two people can interpret the verb (or expression) differently, you need more clarity.
Take the word ‘engagement’ for example.
What does engagement mean exactly?
Viewing articles? Posting articles? Asking Questions? Answering questions? Messaging others? Or some combination of the above?
If you don’t know which behavior you’re trying to encourage, then you won’t have an effective plan of action for doing it.
The approach to get members to post more questions is very different from encouraging more views.
But when we lump these behaviours under ‘engagement’, you can’t select the right tactics to get the behaviour you want. The details haven’t been thoroughly thought through.
Banish The Word ‘Engagement’ From Your Strategy
I always cringe a little when I see the word ‘engagement’ in a client strategy.
I always ask what it means, and the response is usually vague.
This means the organisation hasn’t
Prioritised which behaviours are most important to achieving their goals.
Uncovered what members are most eager and most likely to do.
Decided how best to encourage those behaviors.
Figured out how to measure these behaviors (clarity naturally leads into measurement)
‘Engagement’ is just one example. There are plenty more words that slip into community strategies, which create confusion rather than alignment (growth, connecting, loyalty, etc.).
Here are some of the common offenders (and their better alternatives).
As you can see, once you become more precise about the behaviours we’re trying to encourage, we can start thinking about the exact tactics we will use to promote these behaviours.
Turn Your Goals Into Precise Member Behaviours
Here’s a key strategic principle we cover in our Strategic Community Management course.
The first step, once you’ve established your goals is to turn those goals into the specific behaviors members will need to perform.
There shouldn’t be any vague terms here. Every behavior should be precise.
Think ‘completing a course’ vs. ‘learning’ or ‘publishing an article’ vs. ‘sharing’ etc…
Here’s a free except from our course which explains this in detail:
Notice here how we’re very precise in what behaviours we need members to perform to achieve our goals. There’s no wishy-washy language. It’s clear and precise what members will do to achieve our goals.
And it should be completely logical, too! The behaviors should directly connect to what you’re trying to achieve!
…Then Select Your Tactics To Drive Those Behaviours
Now we can take a Seth approach to figuring out how we drive those behaviors.
We don’t just run random programs; we determine what the feeling or value proposition will be that encourages members to perform those behaviors.
Why will performing that behavior now in our community make sense to them, vs. the myriad of other ways they can achieve their goals?
A key principle of any community strategy is behavior change.
That involves persuasion – and persuasion is about emotions
Once you know the behaviours you want to encourage, you can begin thinking about the tactics you will select to drive those behaviours.
You can find a simple version of this here:
Notice how everything now connects and is logical.
You can see a one-table breakdown below:
There’s a massive volume of research and testing that goes into this in practice – but you get the barebones idea of how to structure a strategy.
If something isn’t working, you can quickly identify the issue and adjust your approach accordingly.
Now the building blocks all come into place, and we can rewrite our initial vague plan to something more precise.
So this…
“We’re going to launch a community to attract customers to engage with each other, share knowledge, and become more loyal to the brand”
Becomes something close to this
“We’re building a forum-centric website to increase retention and reduce support volume. We will achieve this by persuading customers to ask questions here, thereby receiving a quicker response than through any other channel, and motivating experts to answer questions to feel helpful and recognized. To achieve this, we will host a “Peer Champions” initiative, highlight top solutions, embed solutions in our documentation, and promote the avg. time to first response.”
I don’t know if Seth would endorse it, but I’m sure it will fare a lot better under interrogation than the previous plan.
Summary
This is a simplified example, but hopefully you can see how precision creates clarity. It makes it easy to select the run activities to achieve your goals.
In my experience, people tend to be vague, as it avoids rigid thinking and creates wiggle room if they don’t get the behavior they want.
But it also means you’re less likely to achieve what you set out to do in the first place.
The more precise you are, the more successful you’re likely to be.
Register For The Strategic Community Management Course
On July 28, we’re launching our Strategic Community Management course.
The Strategic Community Management course is designed to help you think strategically, not just tactically.
This course distils all the lessons we’ve learned working with the best community professionals in the world into a set of templates, models, and practical steps you can take to ensure you’re doing precisely the right things to create the best community you can.
This course covers:
How to diagnose your community and prioritise what you’re working on.
How to improve the community experience through great UX research.
When, where, and how to engage strategically in third-party platforms.
How to powerfully and effectively position your community in the minds of your members.
How to bring new communities, groups, and other initiatives to life.
How to optimise every aspect of your community.
How to gain and sustain internal support for your community.
The course will also include:
Five live workshop sessions will be taught by us (beginning on July 14).
Access to the templates and resources we use for our own clients.
Our entire video library of resources.
Feedback from myself and a community of learners.
The fee for this course is $750. I’ll see you on the inside.
