How not to build a community: Part I: the anti-community
[photo: JTony on Flickr]
The first mistake I ever made in community fostering is to position the company I worked for in opposition to another one (can't find that post, but I was an idiot). So let me offer this unsolicited advice:
Rule #1 in building your own reputation is to never ever ever build it on the grounds that it is different/better/etc. than an established company
Why not? Well, first of all, designing something in opposition can look this one of these three scenarios:
- Established company may have a loyal following. If you go for the gutteral of said established company, the loyal following becomes their army. You, being relatively new on the scene start off on a severely negative foot with potential future community members. (this is precisely the trap that Zooomr is falling into)
- Crappy thing happens when you position yourself as something your competitor lacks or is not is that, when your competitor gets up to speed, you are position-less. (the fear we have regarding the anti-IE pop up campaign for Firefox now that IE7 supposedly has fixed this)
- Even if established company are big losers and don't have a loyal following, you are now the anti-brand instead of just wonderful you. When you are positioned as the opposition that is all you will ever be. You are just reifying established company's position.
- Even worse, who are you if established company goes away? What would the devil be without an idea of god? Open source without the idea of proprietary? Unconferences without the idea of conferences. Relying on what you are opposing to define who you are carries the burden of not knowing what the hell you are when your nemesis falls...or do you merely become your nemesis? Isn't there a movie with this premise?
Building a community should come from a positive place. A place where you occupy a place that your early adopters believe in. "We are solving B" not "We are solving anti-A" or "We are solving what A is solving, but better"
Coming soon: How not to build a community: Part II: Going for the blonde
tags: pinkomarketing, marketing
3 Comments:
"We are solving B" not "We are solving anti-A" or "We are solving what A is solving, but better"
--well put!
Sometimes the reality is more like, "We are solving what A set out to solve (and said they solved), but never did." That's a tricky one... and I agree, it would be much better to avoid talking about what you do without referring to what someone else did not do. But it's tempting to say something like, "We are what A is, except for real. ; )
Taking your advice on this means I have to be more creative than I've been in some areas, but I'm sure it'll be worth it... for all the reasons you described.
Thanks Tara.
What you're describing is positioning. First, you map out the attributes that really matter to your customers. Then, you locate your existing competitors on the map. Somewhere on it is a hole. It's a set of attributes that none of your competitors can credibly claim to occupy. That's where you want to be. You don't want to come right out and brand yourself by saying "We are here, and nobody else is, especially not competitor X". You simply say "We are here" and let the rest take care of itself. It's possible to position yourself AGAINST a competitor, but it's tricky -- the competitor either has to be so big, slow and dumb that there is no way they're going to react anytime soon, or you have to define them in such a way that they can't. For example, when Avis ran the "We try harder" campaign, it didn't explicitly peg Hertz as being big, slow, bureacratic and inferior, but it did do so implicitly. And it worked. Apple does the same thing. "Think different" arguably implies that everyone else thinks the same, which isn't really true, but which is also impossible to refute.
I agree with Peter. I think it's entirely appropriate (using a search engine analogy) to say if you are/were Google that they are the fast way to search rather than saying,"We are better than Yahoo." The thing is there is much benefit to be derived from being a product that radically improves the way a certain problem is solved. Now as the post says,"How not to build a community." When it comes to building the village you want pioneers to settle in early, those people who geniunely love the product, approach, people or whatever other endearing quality that brings them there. Overtime members of other communities might venture in but when you build the community relocation is not the answer.
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