I know something about you. The fact that you’re reading a book about community management tells me that:

1. You need to know more about strategic community management to improve your business; or
2. You have community management responsibilities; or
3. You’re interested in getting a job with community management responsibilities.

That means this book needs to deliver useful information to 3 different audiences, and make it fun. No sweat!

Now I will share something about me. I know a lot about community management and develop lots of digital business strategies with community at their core, so this book will have a solid theoretical underpinning. But I’m a huge believer in the idea that people learn best by doing.

That means The Community Manager’s Playbook has a strong bias towards action. Have no fear! I’ll ensure we lay a strong strategic foundation for ­implementation, but unlike purely theoretical business books, you’ll find there are questions and exercises throughout the book to reinforce the knowledge. You have complete control over the speed and pace of each lesson. All I ask is that you use what you learn. Doing so will help you build a better team and business. (In fact, the “Learning Pyramid” from the NTL Institute of Applied Behavioral Science suggests that at least fifty percent of learning comes from direct application . . . now you’re starting to see the performance geek in me.)

To begin, I want to explain core concepts and make sure we’re all on the same page.

In this chapter, I’m going to:

1. Define community, in both a general sense and as it applies to business strategy;
2. Explain why people join communities;
3. Demonstrate the power of a strong, well-managed community;
4. Get you up to speed on digital communities; and
5. Teach you how to assess the role of community management in your own organization.

These are important first steps that will form a strong foundation for your community management strategy. Even if you have experience with these topics, I encourage you to review them. Share the love and teach others in your organization, while reinforcing your own knowledge.

Let’s get started!

What Is Community?

By the broadest definition, community brings individuals together around a common purpose, interest, or goal. The most basic type is based on physical proximity. For example, people in your neighborhood or hometown are part of a community that’s formed around that location.

Other traditional communities are based on shared characteristics. Here are a few examples:

• Alumni groups are based on a connection to a specific college or university.
• Sports fans gather to support a team they love.
• Churches bring people together around shared beliefs.
• Classic car clubs find owners of a particular type of car drawn together by their love of that car.

Once upon a time, face-to-face interaction was the main way to form communities and nurture them. The widespread adoption of the Internet has created new ways for people (and businesses interested in those people) to forge connections. We’ll dig deeper into the digital landscape later this chapter.

What Defines a Community?

If you’re waiting at a bus stop, you’re not automatically part of a community with the other people around you (although shared grumbling about the wait could bring you closer!). What makes a community different from random groups of people standing near each other?

Engagement.

A community is an engaged and connected group of individuals in pursuit of mutual interests or a shared commonality.

This is why one of the key objectives for community managers is to drive or increase engagement.

To define a community, you must first know what brings the people together. As you might imagine, there are a number of different reasons and commonalities that compel people to come together in a physical or virtual community setting.

Understanding what moves people to connect and engage is the first step towards building a community that attracts, engages, and retains the right people for your business.

8 Key Reasons People Join Communities

Here are eight of the most common motivators for a person to join a community.

• Identity: Communities often form amongst those who share a common sense of self. For example, members of alumni groups share a past at the same college or university. This experience shaped their identity as alumni. They join alumni groups to connect with people who share this identity.
  • One of my students manages membership for a private club that is only open to alumni of a prestigious top university. On a recent survey, members cited the organization’s connection to the university as the number one reason they joined.
  • Another example is Lululemon. Despite its recent PR troubles (more on that later), the clothing line expanded its business exponentially by uniting customers around a shared identity as a yoga or fitness junkie.
• Purpose: People seek a sense of purpose by working to achieve something important on a grand scale. The goal can be in the form of a social cause, like ending poverty, or in the form of political action, like getting a certain party elected. Communities form around people with a shared purpose.
  • Groups like the American Cancer Society gather members around the purpose of curing cancer. This shared goal unites people because it relates directly to people’s personal experiences and provides support.
• Intent: Groups also form around shared intentions, which is different from purpose. These communities strive toward very specific goals like those who join bereavement groups to overcome the grief of losing a loved one or those who volunteer for an organization that helps the poor.
  • To compare: a purpose-based community would strive to end world hunger, while an intent-based community would organize a soup kitchen to make an immediate, tangible impact.
• Objectives: Objectives are similar to intent, with specific and tangible goals.
  • For example, I am part of the marathon community. This community is united by a common and tangible goal: running 26.2 miles. Within this community, there are groups who run to raise money for a cure for cancer. Those groups are purpose-driven subsets inside the objective-driven community.
  • Objectives aren’t all numbers-driven. Business Network International (BNI) is the world’s largest business networking community. Members participate to gain referrals for their respective businesses and find “win-win” scenarios for each other.
• Interests/Passions: A shared passion for a specific hobby or activity also unites individuals, for example those who practice a sport, dance, or engage in one of the arts, like theater or comedy.
  • Nike Plus has built a huge network of running enthusiasts globally to bring one set of customers together around a common interest through a branded motivational platform. As a result, those involved engage with Nike every single time they go for a run. That creates a sense of brand loyalty that’s incredibly valuable for the company in the long term.
• Drivers: People can also be pushed together by knowledge or “conditions” with shared implications. Market forces can drive businesspeople together; natural disasters forge a bond among affected individuals; even the loss of a loved one can unite the people left behind.
  • As a New Yorker, I think back to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The city organized town hall meetings for those affected, particularly catering to small business owners in lower Manhattan. In the wake of tragedy, community formed.
  • The driver need not be negative. The same phenomenon occurs in positive situations, like weddings, recoveries from serious illness, and other major milestones.
• Behavior: Frequently, motivational systems bring people together. Many groups use the power of accountability and a peer reinforcement model to help members reach their goals. People involved in these communities have behaviors that are impacting their day-to-day lives that need to be changed. The new behaviors provided by these communities can replace the negative ones with the support of the group and guidance of community leaders.
  • Alcoholics Anonymous offers a system of sponsors and chips. Members earn a sense of pride and connection when interacting with other members and showing off their tokens.
  • Weight Watchers, with a daily points system and weekly group weigh-ins, enables dieters to celebrate with other members as their numbers on the scale go down.
• Point of View: People with similar attitudes, whether political, religious or social, often connect with one another. These meetings are not necessarily planned to drive a particular outcome, but often just to connect to people with similar perspectives.
  • Liberals and conservatives might attend meetings to discuss their political views without working towards a concrete agenda.
  • More specifically, think about Barack Obama’s “change we can believe in” campaigns. Citizens United via Organizing for Action was not necessarily in support of Barack Obama as an individual or of specific initiatives he proposed, but in support of the perspective he represented. Shared perspectives can be a powerful force.

What Community Means to Business

So, what exactly are the implications of community?

The common theme across all of those categories is that community gathers people around an idea, whether it’s a larger purpose, a defined objective, or a general point of view. Understanding these motivations will allow you to tap into the power of community for your business.

You can start by finding the shared goals or interests of the people you want in your community. Within that, you need to define which goals or interests make sense and add value to your business.

Earlier, I mentioned the Nike Plus community of runners. Even though creating a platform for runners did not immediately or directly drive sales for Nike, it connected a group of running enthusiasts and kept them engaged with the Nike brand. One can assume that this translated not only to sales in the long run but also into customer loyalty. I use my Nike running app 3–5 times a week, for example, depending on my training objectives. Think about what that kind of frequent customer engagement could do for your business.

Think about the type of product or service your company sells, and what kind of community makes sense to support it. Get inspired by brands like Nike and think beyond the immediate sale. In today’s economy of access and choice, customer preference and loyalty should be coveted as an essential business metric. If you build a devoted community following, that will translate to brand loyalty.

Small Business Knows Communities

Back in “the olden days” (before digital marketing), one segment of the ­business world found a way to capitalize on community: local small businesses. Think back and recollect whether any of the small businesses in your hometown sponsored local town events or your school sports team. You bet they did!

Roche Bros., the local supermarket in my hometown of Westwood, Massachusetts, always donated supplies for school functions and events. By maintaining a strong local presence and connecting their brand to that group identity, Roche Bros. became the favored supermarket of many parents in the community they served.

This basic premise, linking the support of a business to a particular community, is the same idea that we use to engage with our communities today.

What Is Community in the Digital Age?

Some things have changed. The rise of the digital age, with global access to the Internet, has eliminated the need for physical proximity to build communities. Often people are just looking to connect with like-minded individuals or are on a fact-finding mission around a new hobby or purpose.

The most powerful part of community has remained the same: the reason people join. In fact, the digital age has magnified that power since people can search for specific interests and find groups that meet their exact needs more easily than they could before. People are forming bonds as strong, and as real, as friendships forged in the physical world.

This new level of specificity can be harnessed by your business as well. As you work through The Community Manager’s Playbook, you’ll learn how to identify and reach the types of people who want what you’re selling. Imagine that: a community of people who don’t have to be convinced to become customers! This is why community management is such a powerful tool when used wisely.

3 Types of Online Communities for Business

Let’s continue by breaking down the key types of online communities related to business.

1. Business to Business: Earlier, I mentioned BNI, the world’s largest business networking group. As the name suggests, Business to Business (B2B) communities connect people with business needs to share information. These include independent sellers sharing sales tips, and buyers and sellers in an online marketplace exchanging information.
2. Employee to Employee: As with B2B communities, Employee to Employee communities focus on work needs. Employees share best practices and knowledge.
3. Business to Consumer: Business to Consumer (B2C) communities are the main focus of this book. These are the public, front-facing communities that will end up driving business and representing your brand. Examples include customers on a commerce site sharing common interest in a company’s products or brand image and people who subscribe to an online information service discussing relevant information.

The Power of Community Can Make or Break a Business

The importance of community and digital advancements creates a massive business opportunity but, I won’t kid you, it’s not easy. Community managers have to navigate a vast, rapidly changing landscape that shifts from online to offline, (a.k.a. the real world). Thanks to digital channels, the customer journey has become a whole lot more complicated in the last decade. When I started my career in marketing (a segue from journalism), we could count the media mix in the single digits: print, TV, radio, out of home display (billboards, etc.), email, and events. We’ll talk a lot more about understanding where your audience lives, and where and how to engage them in Part 2 of the book.

While this complexity introduces challenges, the rewards are high. Businesses that dive in can capitalize on existing communities or build their own, which creates a deep sense of connection to their brand that might not have been there before.

And you really have no choice anyway. Well, that is if you want your customers to be happy. The days of push-marketing are over. Companies can no longer push one-sided ad campaigns and expect customers to blindly accept their message. The digital age has turned marketing into a two-way conversation.

What does two-way conversation mean? Think about the last time you chose a restaurant. Did you check reviews on a site like Yelp or an app like Foursquare?

How about buying a product or planning a vacation? Did information on sites like Amazon or TripAdvisor factor into your decisions?

Like it or not, customers have a powerful voice in the digital age, especially on social media where people are strongly influenced by the opinions of friends and family. This is what digital marketers call transparency.

Social media has brought such transparency to the customer relationship that businesses have no choice but to respond and tailor their communications. Companies who do not embrace this new landscape risk alienating customers and losing business to savvy competitors.

This is why a good community management initiative is so important.

Community management is more relevant than ever in helping businesses gain and keep their customers. It is the process of inserting a brand into people’s daily lives. Community management is the essential connecting glue between consumers and brands in this new age of transparency.

If managed properly, communities can forge stronger bonds between customers and brands. Building this connection, however, is not a passive process. Businesses and consumers have an incredible ability to give and get feedback. Community management begins from a desire to use that ability to constantly improve products and services and show customers that their voices are heard.

What Happens When You Neglect Community Management

Even though it’s clear that online community management should be at the top of priority lists for most companies, it often fails to find champions. Many promising ideas have fallen flat due to management’s opinion that expanding the digital audience is a “trivial” matter or a secondary marketing priority.

The digital audience is far from trivial. In fact, technology has empowered these communities and the customers within them because the voice of an individual or group can travel across geographic boundaries and social networks. Word of mouth is more powerful than ever as new ways to broadcast opinions and personal reviews are built every day.

Let’s look at the case of Lululemon, a high-end fitness fashion line with a loyal following. In March 2013, a new shipment of their classic yoga pants turned out to be so thin that they were see-through. Consumer trust in the brand fell.

As if that were not enough, in November of the same year, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson publically stated that “some women’s bodies just don’t work in the pants.” His statement implied that customers who didn’t meet his company’s physical standards (having thighs that rubbed together, for example) should not expect the brand’s yoga pants to provide full coverage.

Wilson’s remarks sparked a massive uproar in what had once been described as his “cult-like yoga community.” Members of his brand’s community, in all shapes and sizes lashed out via social media, print media and in face-to-face conversations.¹ Sample Tweets included:

• “For a company with an inspiring and empowering manifesto promoting self love & pride, this rationale does not align . . .”
• “Wearing my @lululemon pants tonight to tennis practice and making sure my thighs rub extra, like they always do. Because I have muscles.”

This scandal became a “hot topic” that was discussed by major news services and people who hadn’t even heard of the brand before this negative story.

This is a prime example of the power of community.

Lululemon’s revenue had been growing at a rate of well-above 25% per quarter before the scandal. Afterwards, it experienced a big drop in growth, to around 20% and below since that statement went public. (See Figure 1-1)

In this scenario, both before and after the scandal hit, community management would have played a key role in understanding customers and advising better ways of responding. Businesses who ignore or disrespect their communities will pay a huge price. The Lululemon case shows that even large brands are not exempt from this truth.

What Is a Community Manager?

We’ve been talking about the importance of community management as though it were a common function in most companies. It is, of course, not yet well established. Community management needs a champion and a shepherd within the organization. The champion needs to be in management and the shepherd is the community manager.

The name says it all. The role of a community manager is not to control or manipulate people, but to manage (that is, facilitate) the communication that exists between customers and company. It is about fostering positive connections and empowering community members to interact with each other and with the business in a meaningful way.

How does one person (or team) accomplish that? Well, by reading this book, of course!

On a more serious note, community managers have to serve multiple constituents. They mediate between customers and the business, delivering valuable customer feedback to the company, while responding and reaching out to customers. At the same time, community managers must inspire community members to interact with each other. Think of them as the ultimate host. All great hosts are skilled at curating the guest list, the menu, and matching everyone’s tastes and preferences. I found my Italian hosting skills came in very handy when I first started as Crunch Fitness’s community supervisor.

Remember earlier in the chapter when I listed the reasons that people join and stay in a community? The common thread running through all those reasons is a connection to other people. If community members are not connecting with each other, it will quickly cease to be a community.

On top of those responsibilities, community managers also help build and maintain a company culture that supports customers and community members. Why is this important? If people inside your company do not understand the needs of your customers, you risk doing business in a way that makes no sense to them. Community managers can help everyone on your team understand how customer feedback can improve their own performance, from a social media intern to an accountant who may never interact directly with customers.

Because of these responsibilities, the community manager role is extremely multifunctional:

1. They overlap with marketers, who specialize in outreach and brand messaging.
2. They facilitate relationships between employees within different departments, much like human resources.
3. They often have to work closely with product development teams to create products and services based on customer feedback.
4. Given their understanding of customer interests and habits, they can also be incredible resources for sales and operations teams.

Complicated, right? Yes and no. While a community manager can do all these things, the key to good business is knowing what your company needs. Understanding all the different ways that this role can be used will help you figure out what type of community manager your business needs or what type you want to be.

I’ll go into much more detail in Chapter 2.

Measuring the Value of Community Management

For now, just know that a community manager can create significant value for your business. I’ve discussed the intangible reasons that community management is important. Now let’s make the business and numbers people more comfortable with this value equation.

Throughout this book, I will share techniques to measure your impact that shows the value of community efforts with bottom-line data. For community managers, this knowledge will equip you to make a case for building and pursuing your strategy. For entrepreneurs and hiring managers, this knowledge will assist you in building a team with quantifiable performance.

Community management is undergoing the same revolution experienced by branding. Brand strategy used to be considered the “fluff”—an added bonus but not a necessity for business. This was because, unlike a new product with measurable revenues, there wasn’t an easy way to measure the success of branding. However, there is clearly a high value; very few people would chose an unknown brand of soda over Coca Cola or Pepsi.

This is the same sort of intangible value that a good community creates. You may not know exactly how to measure it yet, but you already know it when you experience it. Did you know that the Campbell’s Soup Company began as a community built around exchanging recipes and sharing stories about how members prepared meals for their families? Building on that involvement, Campbell’s has become one of the largest corporations in the world.

These days, there are new tools and techniques to measure the success of both branding and community management. As it turns out, both are very important to business success, even though they are often valued at a 4-to-1 ratio on a business’s balance sheet.

How Community Creates Tangible Value

So let’s make the intangible tangible. I’ve pulled in five different tangible activities that can be facilitated through the community principles in this book. After each are the tangible business outcomes that you can track value creation and/or revenue against.

• Complexity gap/customer and stakeholder feedback product/offering requirements and feedback
• Consumer pain points innovation
• Relationship building winning customers/community size and retention
• Touch point/marketing channels (increased awareness) increased purchase intent and sales over time
• Internal engagement and connectivity productivity, retention of smart people (reduce churn and recruitment costs)

What does this all mean?

The complexity gap refers to the increasing amount of data available in the world. Community management is extremely useful for closing this “gap,” which was cited by IBM on its “Capitalizing on Complexity” study in 2010 as the number one problem facing CEOs.

By creating a channel for customer feedback through community management, companies can grow their offerings in conjunction with the desires of their customers. Ultimately, investment in community management will pay off by enabling companies with a rapidly shifting market to see changes in customer behavior and preferences and to leverage the insights about customer needs to make adjustments in products and offerings to create even more value.

Similarly, customer feedback acquired by community management will also identify consumer “pain points,” areas that can lead to improving a current product or service, or even new product creation. Not only does this support innovation, it supports targeted innovation that addresses specific customer needs. That means products and services could be created with a known consumer base. It’s the closest thing to a crystal ball that businesses can have!

Additionally, by listening to customer feedback and nurturing relationships, community managers can establish a real connection between the consumer and the brand. This intangible relationship fosters customer retention and loyalty, and it opens the door for referrals. Through this loyalty, community management can be linked to a growing customer base and community size. This can drive increased awareness of the brand across “touch points” like social media sites, blogs, forums and more. The more touch points there are, the more likely that a company will gain new customers and increase sales.

Community managers are the ears of the organization. They listen to what people are saying about the company. When community managers focus on internal communities, they can also generate tangible value. By creating connectivity—both in communication between departments and shared company culture—community managers can facilitate productivity by attracting, and retaining smart people. By reducing human resources churn, community managers can actually increasing bottom line earnings by driving down recruitment and training costs.

Almost Ready to Dive In . . .

While I hope I have thoroughly convinced you that community management is both valuable and necessary, this book was not written to convince businesspeople of the benefits of creating an online community.

The Community Manager’s Playbook will:

1. Show savvy entrepreneurs who are eager to tackle the challenges of creating strategies for content, distribution, and the measurement of community growth exactly how to do so;
2. Provide marketing and communications staff tasked with determining profitable new strategies with ways to integrate the principles of community management through fresh ideas and methods; and
3. Explain to agencies and business executives who need to refresh business strategies how to use community management to drive growth in revenue and reach.

As such, this book assumes that you now understand what community management is and why it is critical. We’ll now focus on the how.

The Value of Community Management in Your Organization

So . . . how do you design and execute a successful CM strategy? Let’s jump in and find out!

The specific role of community management in your organization will depend on a few different things: organization size and structure, business stage, position, prioritization and resource allocation, internal business, and marketing integration.

Community managers can serve in different departments: marketing, product development, human resources, or their own community department.

Don’t Say It’s Over

Chapter 1 is coming to a close, but our time together is just beginning. You’ve learned:

1. What community is, in both a general sense and as applied to business strategy;
2. Why people join communities;
3. How powerful communities can be;
4. What digital communities are; and
5. How to begin assessing the role of community management in your own organization.

Now that we know what community means and how it can add value, it’s time to define the type of community management that your business needs. The next chapter will help you discover what type of community manager your business needs or what type of community manager you want to be. Let’s go!

_____________________

¹“Chip Wilson LuluLemon Pants Comments Spark Outrage (TWEETS).” The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post B.C, November 7, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/07/chip-wilson-lululemon-pants_n_4236637.html.

²Revenue Growth Graph: “Lululemon (LULU): Revenue Growth.” Wikinvest., April 30, 2014. http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Lululemon_(LULU)/Data/Revenue_Growth.