5

TEAM SELECTION

Your team size and structure will reflect the goals you aspire to support for your organization. The appropriate team size and roles for your brand community will be influenced by several variables.

• Community size

  The number of community leaders should be big enough to deliver value and keep the inside safe enough for both members and visitors. These tasks can include building and maintaining the technical platforms that connect your community. Three leaders for a two-thousand-person Harley-Davidson community isn’t enough. Too many leaders, however, can easily become too much: Twenty leaders for a fifty-person authors’ retreat will feel oppressive. (Charles notes, “I know because I’ve experienced it.”)

• Activities (frequency and type)

  Activities should be frequent enough that visitors can easily find them when they learn about your community and grow excited to visit. This usually means that there should be regular events that members can plan for. One retreat a year might be enough for a business school alumni group, but it certainly won’t be for political activists who are working in a dynamic social landscape with new technology and risking their safety for the work.

• Community maturity

  New communities need a higher leadership-to-participant ratio than do established communities, because original processes, traditions, and expectations are developing. This takes a lot of listening, experimentation, thought, and explanation. Mature communities beyond the critical mass stage can lean on already formed and contributing subcommunities (inner rings) and elders who share the management load.

There is no single best number for a team size. Obviously you need enough people, experience, and knowledge to accomplish your goals. HEC Montreal professor Caroline Aubé’s research indicates that in general as teams grow bigger, the quality of members’ experience decreases. In bigger teams, we find more interpersonal aggression and boastfulness.¹ Authors Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith write plainly in The Wisdom of Teams, “Ten people are much more likely than 50 to successfully work through their individual, functional, and hierarchical differences toward a common plan and hold themselves jointly accountable for the results.”²

So, even though team productivity may be good in larger teams, individuals grow less happy with the experience. Katzenbach and Smith also state that groups bigger than twenty-five have difficulty working as an effective team.³ In short, because we’re concerned with the retention and quality of our teams, we’re better off keeping individual teams only large enough to handle goals.

Appoint (at Least) One Person to Be Responsible for the Community and Self-Organized Activities

Accountability makes a difference, so ensure someone is accountable for community efforts. Ideally, make more than one person responsible. Together, they can start community among themselves as they experiment with connecting others. How many people, what they do, and how they support the community will differ with each brand.

Both Twitch and Airbnb work with two-sided marketplace business models. Some members provide inventory (web content and experiences), and others purchase. Each firm employs teams that work every day to care for and grow relevant communities both in size and deep connection. The work is so involved that they do several things all year round:

• Travel and host events on several continents
• Host members at world headquarters
• Make their own direct contact information available
• Monitor online discussions every day
• Measure both qualitative and quantitative research after each event
• Design and send gifts around the world

We know a person who served as the head of community for a Fortune 50 company with more than nine thousand retail stores across the US. We’ll call him David. He was hired to help “connect” and improve the relationship between headquarters and the vast retail staff. The company wanted better collaboration among departments and less animosity among headquarters, distribution centers, and thousands of stores. David discovered that vast parts of the company weren’t even talking to one another. Because many stores sold medication, poor communication with distribution and headquarters meant that customers didn’t get critical service on time, and many simply walked over to competitors. After observing and listening to the concerns and frustrations, David proposed setting up an invitation-only online platform to provide the first space for discussion and collaboration among departments. One area was designated “bright ideas,” where employees could share innovative ideas generated from their unique perspective. It solved many communication problems. This included giving headquarters direct access to “what the stores were saying” about timely and ongoing problems. David’s efforts to connect critical parts of the company led to higher store employee engagement, more efficient employee work time, and innovated operations. David is especially proud that the increased direct communication enabled the company to recognize and handle several sensitive situations that could have grown into public relations disasters. David’s work took years to grow truly effective, and internal research showed that the company culture did change.

Transitioning Volunteers to Paid Staff

Formally hiring current volunteers can be a good way to start building a paid team. Ideally, your volunteers have already built trust within the community so that when entrusted with formal and greater authority, they can get support from their existing informal authority.

Volunteers are typically people who have shown they already contribute in ways that reflect their internal motivation. That motivation can expand with new responsibilities, opportunities, and resources. Bringing them on as paid staff can be a good way to formally recognize their contribution.

If you choose to hire a volunteer as staff, protecting internal motivation in the community is important. It’s critical to communicate to participants that the hire is not payment for earlier contribution. Such a relationship would be transactional and would erode internal motivation within the community. (See more on protecting internal motivation in part 3.) Rather, appropriate hires are to recognize contribution and now support further contribution.

So, yes, please hire volunteers who demonstrate that they’re competent, helpful, and driven. And avoid hiring people simply because they’re members. Membership alone never makes someone qualified to do a job well.

Community Management Expectations

We are often surprised how little leaders understand what effective brand leadership will look like and what will need the most attention when growing a community. This section will help you recognize what membership needs will look like from a leader’s perspective.

Focusing on a Strong Core: The Pareto Principle

No matter how large or small your community, a small core will provide most of the work and value. Many community leaders don’t understand this, and will complain that “not everyone” is very involved. That’s just how it is, just about everywhere.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule) will show up in many areas in your community, not just in membership involvement. The principle predicts that no less than 80 percent of success (or results and value) will come from no more than 20 percent of resources. This applies to time, money spent, people, phone calls . . . nearly everything. Author Joseph M. Juran named the principle after a nineteenth-century Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto.⁴

For example, whatever your favorite community is, our guess is that you experience at least 80 percent of what you love about it during no more than 20 percent of the time you spend in it.

The Pareto principle is also regressive. What do we mean? Think about a group you like that has about ten members. We are willing to bet that two of the members did the vast majority of the (helpful, important, or effective) work that made the group worthwhile. Now consider a larger group, with about one hundred members. Our guess is that approximately twenty (or fewer) core members did the bulk of the important work, and of those, four did at least as much work as the other sixteen in the core membership (because 20 percent of twenty is four). This means that 4 percent of all resources often can deliver 64 percent of results from a resource set. We can even drill down another level: 0.8 percent of resources can produce about half of all success.

Charles explained this principle to a firefighter who knew at least two hundred firefighters in her area community. He acknowledged that he knew almost nothing about fire rescue or the firefighters she knew, but he guessed that if she had to choose (on the basis of their proficiency) who would rescue her in an emergency, there would be eight firefighters (the top 4 percent) she would choose to respond as a team instead of all the other 192 combined, and he guessed that she already knew exactly who they were. She paused for a moment, obviously startled by the bold guess, and then said, “Absolutely!”

The Pareto principle doesn’t apply to every set of resources, but it does apply to a startling number. This lesson is to help you understand that it’s normal, predictable, and perfectly fine that members’ participation will typically look radically unequal. Who those most active people are and how many participate at what level will shift over time. Just remember that contribution and effectiveness will remain very imbalanced. Notice how the participation imbalance looks graphically in figure 5.1.

We call the most involved 20 percent (or less) the core group or core membership, and the membership including the less involved 80 percent (or more) the general membership. There is nothing wrong or bad about general membership: (Virtually) every community has (and needs) these people. Besides making up the bulk of the community, the general membership can provide motivation, excitement, and the most data about overall community health and value. The core members are just more important and more effective in making a community work.

We call the top 4 percent (or fewer) critical members. When you understand the Pareto principle as applied to membership involvement, then you know to identify the top 4 to 20 percent and to focus attention on what they want and appreciate, and how they prefer to participate.

Your invitations, events, messages, members, visitors, funders, and time invested will almost all work within a Pareto distribution. This means that, for better or worse, the vast majority of all these components will prove fairly ineffective. A small minority of each of them will deliver (overwhelmingly) the most results—4 to 20 percent is the effective portion. This is normal and can indicate that your efforts are working.

FIGURE 5.1. The Pareto Principle in Communities

Recently an Oakland Adventure Club board member mentioned that the board wanted to bring on new members who will take on many responsibilities now handled by older members. She explained that there were, in all, about sixty club members. In conversation, she confirmed that about twelve members were overwhelmingly doing the work (at least 80 percent of it) to keep the club functioning and that three were real pillars for keeping the community working. The uneven responsibility here is both irritating and completely normal. There are many ways to newly involve more members, but “normal” is always going to look uneven.

When we learn about a community with, say, 5,000 members, we know that most (approximately 4,000 of them) will remain largely uninvolved. About 1,000 (core) maintain some significant engagement, and 200 (critical) really make things work. Two hundred committed people can accomplish a lot of important stuff. You may have already figured out that of the two hundred, forty of them are super-involved, and almost certainly there are eight serving critical and outsized roles for the community. It’s probably true that if those eight leave, the community, as the members know it, will collapse. Yes, eight people out of five thousand can collapse a community as it is.

Who participates at each level will shift over time. What matters is understanding that even inside very large organizations, there’s a surprisingly small group that wields great influence. It is terribly important that the most influential remain so because of their integrity and effectiveness and not because systems and tradition entrench the top core.

Online participation seems to work within an exaggerated Pareto distribution (still consistent with the Pareto principle). Early studies indicated that most online “communities” experienced a 90-9-1 contribution rate.⁵ This means that, of visitors, 90 percent were passive consumers, 9 percent were active contributors, and 1 percent were so-called supercontributors. This was the case with early online communities, such as eBay’s seller community (based on personal communication with Shira Levine, April 2019) and Wikipedia users.⁶ It is impossible to eradicate all “participation inequality,” so don’t try! Your goal is to grow the “effective contribution” group either by gross numbers or as a percentage of the whole community (or both).

This is one reason why, when we hear brand leaders brag that they’ve built communities of millions, we roll our eyes a bit. We know that most of those numbers largely consist of names on a list (mirage community). The active participants are always a fraction.

Let’s look at some real-world numbers.

We’ve already mentioned the online streaming platform Twitch a few times. By any standard, there are many members involved and committed to the global Twitch community. This includes engaging in gatherings around the world and in art projects, and connecting daily.

Twitch attracts more than 150 million unique viewers each month. Only 1.5 million members (1 percent) broadcast the content that all other members watch. A mere fifteen thousand (.01 percent) of those broadcasters attract the bulk of viewers, and 30 percent of all traffic is driven by only 150 individual broadcasters (.0001 percent) (from personal communication with Twitch’s Marcus Graham, April 2019).

Marcus confirmed that if those 150 people were suddenly to stop participating simultaneously, “Twitch would be devastated. It is hard to comprehend how much that would hurt the organization.” Consider that those 150 people represent only the tiniest percentage of Twitch participants. There is no question that if a particular .002 percent of members (about three thousand) stopped participating, Twitch would end as members know it. It doesn’t matter that 150 million others participate at some level each month.

The global beauty retailer Sephora hosts an online community of twenty thousand of its most important customers. The company’s research revealed that members spent twice as much as Sephora’s average customers. When Shira Levine, then head of community, started her role, it was known within the company that a single community member, nicknamed Vera100 here, was responsible for creating fully 30 percent of all community content.

To be clear, we hope and expect that much of your membership will contribute and offer value to your communities. What matters is that you see that, even when tens of thousands or tens of millions are involved, a scant few really make the community what it is and shape how it serves members.

As a leader who understands unbalanced participation and effectiveness, you are responsible for protecting the participants who make your community proceed toward its goal(s), reflect the core values, and keep the inside safe. Given that leadership attention is limited and that only some ideas and priorities can get resources, there are two important jobs that respect the unbalanced participation.:

1. Pay special attention to the core and critical members’ needs, concerns, and aspirations. They’re special to the community, so treat them that way.
2. Find the effective core members and encourage, support, and resource them on a path that invites them into the critical member ring. This is also called identifying and investing in new leaders. This is how your community will grow. If members feel “held back” from contributing, they’ll seek somewhere else they can flourish.

The inner-ring principle applies directly to your core and critical membership. Ensure that they get invited into an inner ring with appropriate privileges. It is one way to encourage and protect them.

There are always participants who just want to know what they can get for themselves—every day, meeting, event, hour, or minute. Although all participants should receive value (or why stick around?), focus your attention on those who are willing to contribute for others. Community requires mutual concern for others, and core members must demonstrate this for all.

The prioritization of a fairly small subset in a brand community, and honest but lesser engagement with most, reflects how personal friend communities are experienced and increasingly trend in general. Brown University public policy fellow and author Marc Dunkelman writes that Americans’ interpersonal connections have changed and continue to change in ways that make close relationships more important. He describes community relationships as being divided into three rings (not to be confused with the inner-rings principle).⁷

1. The outer ring of a broad network of people we rarely meet or with whom we only share one experience (e.g., a concert, conference, or party)
2. The middle ring made up of people we know well enough that we can ask favors of them. We form lasting bonds with these folks over years. These connections are not as close as family and not as distant as mere acquaintances.
3. The inner-most ring of close friends and family.

Dunkelman argues that for a number of reasons (including the explosion of people connected by social media outer rings), the middle ring is shrinking. Americans seek more relationships in the outer and inner rings and consequently the experiences that offer these relationships. It is therefore important to allow visitors to experience some community events (outer ring) and then offer intimate experiences appropriate for members to build close relationships. These innermost ring members will make up your core. If communities offer largely “middle ring” connections, then they’re offering something that is largely unwanted.

We want to be clear here: The high-performer distinction does not mean that high-performing members can or should participate outside the principles that make communities work. Although they may (and should) get special privileges, communities work when they serve members in growing into who they aspire to be, and where the inside is safe. If high performers don’t contribute to this growth and safety or if they distract, erode, or ignore these fundamental principles, then whatever else is true, they’re eroding the community.

You can get the greatest makeup artist in the world to come to Sephora events and carry on about makeup trends and eye shadow application, but if that person is an aggressive jerk making the inside unsafe, then the knowledge may be great, but they are harming community. Any community is by definition bigger than one person. If someone isn’t accountable for supporting authentic community, then at some disruptive threshold that individual must leave.

Remember, most people can get lots of data from books and video. Members get value in community from relationships (connecting). Leadership must hold high performers accountable as members no matter the outsized value they bring.

Community Management Expectations

There are no self-managing communities. Someone has to do the work. Your community’s leaders keep the inside safe, refocus activity toward a goal (as needed), restate the values, and share the important stories. Although there are different management styles, forms, and formality levels, there needs to be management.

Management is a unique branch of knowledge. This book works to support leaders in distinguishing and applying principles for making brand communities work for both members and organizations. How you set all this up for your particular participants, purpose, era, place, resources, and so on needs a specialized and nuanced conversation. We’ll address some common community management questions. ⁸

Do brand communities need full-time attention?

The answer to this question depends on the answer to a different question: How much do you want your brand community to succeed? Effective communities demand much more attention than every new community leader predicts. We can predict how much attention it will take for you about as well as we can predict how much attention your marriage and parenting need. Maybe you can grow a healthy marriage and be a good parent by devoting two hours every Sunday. We doubt it.

Twitch’s Erin Wayne, for example, is reachable by dozens of Twitch city leaders around the world. They know they can reach out any time they need to contact Twitch, and they do.

If you’ve got a real brand and you want a real community that actually serves members, grows, and supports your organization, this endeavor will almost certainly need at least five times the amount of thought and time that you think it will.

Should we not even start because it will take a lot of time and work?

Sometimes the answer is yes. And this may be why you’re reading this book. Most likely, there are people out there who you believe want to connect to do something new, important, fun, and/or simply satisfying. That sounds like a good reason to experiment with community building and see what grows and what needs get served.

When should we hire/appoint a full-time brand community manager?

Like marriages, every organization, context, and aspiration differs from all others. What it took to create a fan community for Lady Gaga cannot simply be duplicated to create a fan community for a different pop star in a different time. Only you can reflect on where you are, what you want, and what it will take to cross the distance.

The following are questions to consider when thinking of appointing a full-time community manager:

• How much time are you spending now?
• What influence do you aspire to create?
• What impact are you creating now?
• Will the value of a strong brand community warrant the investment?

As you answer these four questions, you should be able to get a sense of whether a full-time community manager is appropriate.

Network Effect

Leadership must always ensure that the community is enriching (serving) members and offering experiences consistent with shared core values. In the beginning, when your community has only a few members, this may be hard. A Miata drivers’ community can offer relatively little Miata repair help if there are very few Miata owners participating. (In other words, more participants could offer more help.)

As you grow from the inception stage to critical mass, you’re working toward a tipping point, when the community provides real value (e.g., easy car repair advice) to essential stakeholders.

In a brand community context, a working definition of the network effect is that the more people who use (or participate with) a resource, the more value it offers. User ratings sites like Yelp and resources like Google Maps are examples of resources that get better over time, thanks to the network effect. However, most Yelp reviewers and Google map editors aren’t in community. Said differently, they’re not growing mutual concern. This isn’t bad; it’s just distinct from brand community building. Note that Nish Nadaraja at Yelp invested in building a brand community among Yelp’s top “elite” reviewers because he recognized their importance for Yelp’s success.

Communities can benefit from a network effect as well, but only when the growth is managed and limited. This is because a successful community shares core values, not just visitation or casual participation. If adding people leads to more participants without the shared core values, then the new participants erode community strength even when you have bigger participant numbers to brag about.

Remember, giving away free pizza in downtown Oakland will get you bigger participation numbers. It just won’t make a better community. For the record, we’re all for network effects. Just make sure you invest appropriately for both network effect and membership connection.

Two-Sided Marketplaces

A community can serve more than one distinct type of member (e.g., Harley owners and motorcycle repair professionals). Two-sided markets (also called two-sided networks) are economic platforms that bring together at least two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. A platform that primarily offers value by supporting connection between (at least) two types of affiliated customers is called a multisided platform.⁹ Examples include “credit cards (composed of cardholders and merchants); Health Maintenance Organizations (patients and doctors); operating systems (end-users and developers); video-game consoles (gamers and game developers).”¹⁰

Brands that serve two-sided markets can be life changing, even lifesaving. But they don’t necessarily create community. Travel brand Airbnb, online broadcasting brand Twitch, and company review website Yelp all invest in community for their two-sided platform business models, but not all users and customers are involved in these companies’ brand communities.

When working toward the critical mass stage in a two-sided network community, you must understand that you have at least two inner rings. (See The Art of Community, 87.) Each has different goals and needs (e.g., the differing goals for Harley riders and motorcycle mechanics). Although there is often overlap between the two rings, the participants’ engagement will look very different, and you’ll need to think about how you’ll serve both.

In the beginning, this always looks like a “chicken-and-egg” challenge. What to create first to attract the other? Always start with engagement on the “supply side” from the community creator perspective. (In our example, start with the motorcycle repair experts.).

This is important because without the “supply,” there is no opportunity for the customer/users to progress toward their goal (of getting that supply). Further, supply-side members often are excited to connect in friendship, celebrate, and learn from one another while they develop toward the goal of finding more customers/users. Twitch (broadcasters), Etsy (makers), and Yelp (local reviewers) have all discovered that this is exactly what happens among their supply-side members.

Offer the members on the supply side what will engage and bring them to connect, and then build growth on the “demand” side (Harley riders).

Starting a community with “one side” usually takes more time than leaders want or expect it to. Success can require years of effort. When you commit to two sides, you’ll need even more patience. In many ways, you’re creating two communities, one for each set of core values and purpose, even if the inner rings overlap.