3

DISTINGUISHING COMMUNITY

Earlier, when we discussed mirage communities, we noted that many people use the term community to refer to many other things, most of which are not actual communities. So, now that we’ve discussed what makes a brand community and the ways that many communities support brand goals, for clarity, let’s distinguish other things that leaders mistake for brand communities before.

Recognizing Platforms

We refer to a community platform as a technology that allows members to directly communicate, share, and discover one another and resources no matter where they are. A platform almost always involves software that enables participants to connect with shared information. It’s a tool, which is never enough, by itself, for creating a community.

Evan Hamilton has spent years supporting and nurturing users’ communities at Reddit, among other companies. He offered a helpful metaphor: “A platform is a restaurant where you meet friends weekly for noodles and dumplings. The community is the group of friends” (personal communication with Evan Hamilton, April 2019; emphasis added). The community is durable and precious. Even if the restaurant closes, the relationships continue. Friends find another place to gather.

In other words, building a platform (even a really good one) does not guarantee that a community will form. If you build an oak dinner table, you can’t assume that fantastic dinner parties will suddenly appear, complete with witty banter and delicate desserts. The parties are certainly possible, but a lot more and different work lies ahead.

Many mistakenly believe that technology alone (e.g., a new platform) will attract members and create connectedness. This is never the case. To go back to our dinner-table example: invitations, a warm welcome, generous eats, and the like will do more to create a fantastic dinner party than even the most beautiful table. In fact, if the other parts are right, the table can be perfectly ordinary.

Communities can change venues and platforms. What we set up, encourage, and invite others into so that they can grow connections is what eventually creates a community.

Remember that everyone who visits a community platform is not automatically part of a community, just as simply visiting a local sports field doesn’t make you part of the circle of friends who meet there, although that may be a first step. Participants begin as visitors. We visit because someone is creating something (a basketball game?) that we want to experience.

We visit and join communities because we want to participate in the leadership’s vision and mission that align with our own values and some growth aspiration. Sharing ourselves in intimate ways creates the relationships, which create community.

Recognizing Advocacy Campaigns

By advocacy, we mean any organizational effort to motivate individuals outside the organization to enact change. Advocacy work usually includes sharing a change message widely. With advocacy, an organization seeks to grow its influence. This growth can take place, for example, in the domain of political change, in the adoption of a for-profit company’s technology, or in a nonprofit’s involvement in promoting a social good.

It’s important to understand that advocacy and community, though often related, remain distinct from each other.

Advocacy campaigns often seek to build community, and for good reason. Addressing the world’s challenges takes many people working together over long periods of time. Sometimes, advocating organizations create community; sometimes, communities become advocating organizations. We (Carrie and Charles) both have participated in many advocacy actions. These have included standing among thousands we didn’t know and leading dozens who all knew us.

When police pull some advocating activists aside and detain them, a larger group may not notice that someone is now missing, or who. In a community (of activists), it’s far more difficult for someone to get lost, because members know and care for one another. This is especially important when there are others who want to make trouble for harassment’s sake and when we’re including vulnerable participants.

There are at least two types of organizational advocacy:

1. Brand advocacy, which promotes a brand
2. Political advocacy, which works for policy change

There is overlap in these categories: a political organization can brand-advocate by promoting its own brand (e.g., Black Lives Matter or Greenpeace), and a corporate brand can organize political advocacy (e.g., Patagonia’s Open Rivers advocacy).

How Advocacy Differs from Community

Leadership must recognize that, strictly speaking, advocacy is distinct from both the brand community itself and the community-building work in at least five ways:

1. Advocacy can be a one-time effort (one day, one week, one event).
2. Priorities are chosen top-down.
   Members are told what will be advocated.
3. The top goal is promoting something.
   Mutual care among members is a lesser (perhaps even ignored) commitment.
4. Relationships trend toward the transactional.
   This can mean rewarding someone for taking an action (calling, speaking, or attending), in contrast to a generous commitment to one another to uphold fundamentally enriching relationships. Examples of tools used for transaction include swag, exclusive invitations, cross promotion, internal points rewards, badges, and labels.
5. Relationships trend toward a “wagon wheel” structure.
   Participants primarily connect with an authority and keep few or no relationships with peers. By contrast, authentic communities tend toward a web-like relationship structure whereby participants connect with peers.

There’s nothing wrong with advocacy, advocacy campaigns, or gathering people in a group to make a difference together. In fact, we’re big fans of all three, and we participate in many advocacy groups. You can do all of this effectively both in and outside community. The important lesson is to recognize that focusing only on strict advocacy will never form a durable community.

Community requires different attention. In fact, focusing exclusively on advocacy can harm community dynamics that may already naturally be in place. This shouldn’t be surprising: Few of us want to remain connected with others who want us primarily to serve their agenda. You have to invest in a foundation of community first and then engage in advocacy.

For example, Charles joined a political phone-bank event to support ensuring access to health care for all Americans. The event was hosted in a downtown San Francisco office, and more than thirty professionals came in on a sunny Saturday to volunteer. Each participated because they cared about all Americans getting medical attention (value). They all wanted to support making this happen (purpose).

As volunteers arrived on-site, the organizing leader pointed to a URL on a whiteboard and told them to login and then start calling the numbers and use the talking points provided by online software.

The organizer didn’t spend even five minutes encouraging volunteers or giving them introductions or time to connect with one another to find camaraderie. He didn’t acknowledge that the volunteers’ showing up was a reflection of commonly shared values or that all in the room shared a purpose. He also never acknowledged that this work was important if any change was to happen!

He did, however, give instructions to “get something done” (phone calls). That organizer treated all those volunteers merely as free labor for his organization.

To effect the change that all the volunteers worked toward that day could take years. It was, and is, vitally important that volunteers who showed their commitment on that sunny weekend return to do more. They’ll only do this if the volunteer opportunities provide them an opportunity to feel connected and to participate toward a purpose. There was so much potential to start a community of people who could have enthusiastically worked together for years. All was missed by focusing on “getting something done.”

Leaders of an advocacy community must distinguish between just a “group” volunteering on a Saturday and a potential community gathered to work together toward a purpose for possibly years. If your advocacy goals will take years and need ongoing support, we imagine that you’ll always want both community and advocacy. If you ignore the community part, you’ll always be left with fleeting participant manipulation.

All too often, people assume that advocacy naturally builds community. We hope that by this point in the discussion, you already understand that the opposite is true. Strict advocacy can impede community building because relationships remain transactional, and even the time needed to build connections goes missing.

People also too often rely on fragile transactional relationships, assuming that such relationships will eventually create an advocacy community. In reality, using a transaction strategy means a group’s durability will end as soon as the leader (or the brand) stops offering transactions. When the rewards stop, the relationship stops. It’s really that simple.

Our guess is that you almost never nurture relationships in which others only want to get something from you (e.g., your labor) each time you connect. We all know people like this, and we don’t call them. They only call us to ask for stuff. They may think we’re friends, but they’re wrong.

Brand Advocacy

Many brands invest in advocacy efforts that misunderstand how and why members mobilize. Misguided leaders believe the myth that if people are already in their community, they’ll advocate for the brand under any conditions.

Carrie worked with an online media company that learned this the hard way. The company helps over one million users contribute relevant media to several online platforms. (We’ve slightly altered this description to protect privacy.) At the time, the company managed more than five thousand members in a collaborative messaging platform. The leaders assumed that they could use these members to promote the company widely on social media platforms.

They decided to “empower” their customers to share sales promotions and feature announcements. The intention might have worked if the program had also helped members achieve their own goals. This was not the case.

The company invested in “ambassador management software” that allowed happy customers to post messages in exchange for points toward both Amazon and Starbucks gift cards (a transaction).

In the first six months, only fifteen people participated. Neither the director of marketing nor the community strategist could understand how more than 99.5 percent of their customers ignored the program. They wondered why loyal customers wouldn’t love sharing messages for the company in exchange for coffee or other products.

Well, it’s because no one loves sharing messages if doing so doesn’t help them connect, become who they want to be, or progress toward an aspirational purpose. At no time did the company consider how it was supporting participants in connection or growth. Later research showed that the participants didn’t want to get distracted from work tasks in order to promote the company. Essentially, the trade the company offered wasn’t enough to “buy” the time and the help from participants. Therefore, participants ignored them.

By contrast, consider an organization that approached membership advocacy totally differently. In 2007, then Illinois senator Barack Obama ran for the US presidency. The Obama for President organization needed many people to join advocating for the senator. Yet the campaign didn’t have the budget to pay for field organizers in every state. The campaign managers knew there were thousands of volunteers who wanted to get involved even when the campaign didn’t have the bandwidth to organize them.

According to authors Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han, who wrote the book Groundbreakers about Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, “Before the 2008 Obama campaign, many political operatives treated community organizing and electioneering as mutually exclusive endeavors . . . Neglecting the long-term base building that characterizes community organizing, most contemporary electoral campaigns focus on creating temporary voter turnout machines that disappear when the election is over. These campaigns win without investing in citizens’ capacity to make change, or to be leaders in their communities . . . In such campaigns, volunteers, when available, do not have responsibility for any real outcomes and are sometimes viewed as a drain on resources rather than an asset.”¹

Inspired by Harvard Kennedy School professor Marshall Ganz, a campaign strategy was created to empower disconnected enthusiasts without a traditional centralized authority. The new strategy depended on building authentic community. The campaign built the online platform My.BarackObama.com which enabled supporters to both create and connect at grassroots local events, where they made friends among neighbors and colleagues.

Volunteers didn’t create events and support the campaign in return for money, awards, or trades. They did so (1) freely, so that they could (2) connect with like-valued citizens and (3) advance toward electing a more progressive president (purpose). In other words, the campaign supported internal motivation to participate in community in all three critical ways. (We will discuss internal motivation more in part 3.) Past campaign strategies had neglected the importance of interpersonal connections for similarly motivated participants.

For the Obama campaign, many thousands of volunteers created local events where participants could and did share intimate experiences and discover how much they shared in both values and aspirations. Because event creation didn’t depend on campaign headquarters, many more events were created than in the past. This meant that supporters could and did grow friendships connecting during multiple events. They also experienced shared delight and memories that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. The intimacy and friendship building were a sharp contrast to past campaigning where volunteers were largely invited to tedious hours of phone banking, canvassing, and data entry.

Eventually, more than two million volunteers advocated for Obama’s campaign, making it the largest volunteer-powered presidential campaign in history. The phone banking, canvassing, and data entry got done. According to early volunteers, the “secret ingredient” that inspired so much volunteer advocacy was the formation and deepening of personal relationships within the campaign. Volunteers in time considered themselves “family.” Though Obama even considered the campaign a trial run in the beginning, the campaign powered by millions of volunteers across all states won him the US presidency.

Recognizing Social Media Management

Managing social media is as different from building a community as is running an advocacy campaign. This doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. As leaders, however, we must recognize the distinction between promotion and relationship development.

Social media can be fantastic for promoting a community or event(s). But it’s lousy at knitting together relationships to create or deepen community— just as building a dining table doesn’t make you a good cook and sharing menus doesn’t make you a good dinner host. We must distinguish between furniture building (the platform), menu sharing (promotion), and actual dinner hosting.

Now, in our metaphor, guests may enthusiastically share the menu, dessert photos, and selfies with a chef on social media. This can be great for cataloging a lasting memory, attracting others to the next dinner, and just plain celebrating a successful dinner. However, at the end of the day, the events that deepen relationships overwhelmingly happen within intimate experiences (not on social media). This means that participants joining the dinner grow relationships that make a community. Everyone else just learns about it.

There are three key principles to understanding how social media management differs from the core work of building brand community.

1. Conversations are prompted. Many social media managers start conversations to get more “engagement” from customers. Although there’s nothing wrong with this, in a mature brand community, leadership will see unplanned conversations start and grow without prompting or stoking.
2. Brand promotion is the primary motive. Most social media management holds its primary goal as promoting a brand, ideally deftly. The most important measurements then become “impressions” (number of people who “could have seen” a posting) and “clicks” (follow-up act from an impression). Clicks are measured as a CTR (click-through rate). In an authentic brand community, the quality of value delivered to participants and the relationships are far more important for community strength than any number of clicks.
3. Communication is largely broadcast (one to many). Most social media managers “push” content out to many, seeking impressions and clicks. This can be both effective and fun. It also builds an audience (not a community). In authentic brand communities, we see group conversations in which the communication resembles people sitting in a group talking rather than a speaker presenting to an audience.

None of these conventions are necessarily bad. The danger lies in using them too much, thereby inhibiting the growth of an authentic brand community.

When leaders misunderstand social media’s relationship to community, they often try leaning heavily on increasing branded postings and asking participants to promote (i.e., to act as a brand ambassador). An invitation to “brand ambassadorship” can be fun for members while it’s novel (or if it distinguishes them within an inner ring), but by itself, ambassadorships never result in authentic community. This is always true if there is little (or likely no) opportunity for developing mutual concern among participants. Intimate shared experiences remain necessary for real connection.

To be effective leaders, we must distinguish between social media activity that promotes events and other meaningful engagement that knits community. Glossier did a good job focusing on promotion when appropriate and not pretending that its audiences make a community. Glossier is a billion-dollar beauty brand that focuses on products for millennials and Gen Z and millions of social media has followers.² The company often features customers in its brand Instagram stories along with almost daily photos of celebrity influencers using its products. The brand thus inspires customers to showcase their own looks on social media. Some customers also started their own Glossier Instagram profiles, such as Glossier Boys (for customers who are men) and Glossier on Brown Beauties (for customers who are people of color). The company’s robust growth is in large part a result of encouraging customer fanaticism. Note that with this activity, Glossier is not building community with its fans (yet), but is still effective in celebrating fans and driving business growth. Their choice is both transparent and perfectly appropriate (and successful) for the brand.

Elsewhere in this book, we discuss Sephora’s efforts to connect and provide meeting forums for customers both in stores and online. The company is growing a different kind of success with different investments. Investing differently just creates different outcomes.