[Looking back... by Cindy47452 on Flickr]
Paul Ding, in a comment on my post over at the Future of Communities wrote:
Having a tent at the county fair, where people work together, elbow to elbow, to feed hungry fair-goers, builds community. Potlucks in the church basement build community. CROP walks build community….You can’t create community. We can foster it. We can provide comfortable seating, dim the lights, provide good music, and pour well-iced drinks, but that’s not enough, either. A community coalesces around people with passion, who can express that passion. If you have that, a community will form. If you don’t have it, they will “stay away in droves.”
Amen Paul. (btw…your blog is in my reading list now…great stuff)
In fact, the other day, I came across the entry in Wikipedia for Community Building:
…is a field of practices directed toward the creation or enhancement of community between individuals within a regional area (such as a neighbourhood) or with a common interest. It is sometimes encompassed under the field of community development.
A wide variety of practices can be utilized for community building, ranging from simple events like potlucks and small book clubs, to larger–scale efforts such as mass festivals and building construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors.
Activists engaged in community building efforts in industrialized nations see the apparent loss of community in these societies as a key cause of social disintegration and the emergence of many harmful behaviors. They may see building community as a means to increase social justice, individual well-being and reduce negative impacts of otherwise disconnected individuals.
Right. So, communities are built around providing more positive experiences for the communities themselves. So, now with the ’shift’ of Community Building into the commercial realm, where does this leave the practice of increasing social justice, individual well-being and the reduction of negative impacts of otherwise disconnected individuals? I suppose this is where I fear the growth of this ‘Community 2.0′ meme. That the higher purpose of building communities gets solipsised for the drive for higher sales and better ROI. And Return on Information as a metaphor doesn’t really satisfy that, either.
From what I see, we are a couple of trains missing one another in the night…it is really a matter of perspective and, if, as Francois eloquently put it, “that is just how we have conditioned a whole generation of business leaders” then the REAL answer is to re-condition (or is it DEcondition?) these business leaders before we throw another marketing strategy in front of them.
To use a metaphor, teaching current business leaders a community-centric approach would be like painting over peeling wallpaper…no matter how you look at it, that wall will look like crap.
And, any truly community-centric person knows that it is education that is needed first, and that requires patience. No simple answers. No race to the beginning. It will take time and bridges of understanding and win-win situations. And the truth is that there are enough companies already doing this that those companies that enter the community discourse look like bulls in a china shop, rushing around like wild animals, throwing their weight around. Nobody wants to be in that shop when they are done. Nobody.
Yes, we (as in the royal ‘we’ being those of us who are your customers) know better. And there are companies who are successfully fostering community and they do it with ease and elegance. Why? Well, mostly because they are part of the community they are serving. As Chris wrote over on the CA Blog, “Tara and I ran into Stewart on the bus to the office a short while ago and it couldn’t have been more reassuringly mundane.” It was. He sat between us and we laughed about our obsession with our handheld devices and asked one another how the new commute is (both of our offices moved into the same area within the past couple of months). This is the same guy appearing on CNN and the cover of Businessweek. There he was, riding the bus, having fun comparing downloaded mobile apps. Caterina? Super friendly, casual and accessible. Jimmy Wales? He’s on my Twitter list. Craig Newmark? He answers all of his own support email.
The NEW business leaders don’t have the same baggage. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe the time is right for them to emerge. I believe the whole nature of ’success’ is shifting. There is something in the air and, like Paul says, “it is always going to boil down to a Star Wars-type good versus evil community versus return (on investment) discussion.” In other words, there will be a struggle and it will be really apparent in the coming years.
But after the smoke clears, we won’t be left with a monolithically “right way to be”, but rather, peaceful tribes, co-existing in a world (not new) that not only accepts, but REWARDS multiple “ways to be” (new).
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13 Comments
First off - you used the word solipsised. I just like the way that word looks.
Now, my main point: communities are not conjured up like some David Blaine stunt. People connect - around the damndest things oftentimes - and then stuff happens. Mostly it’s human stuff - ocassionally it’s commerce.
The very origin of the word - Middle English communite, citizenry, from Old French, from Latin commūnitās, fellowship, from commūnis, common - is a reminder that tribes are what holds us in common with others.
If v2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 of community is blending borg-like tracking tools with community, then somewhere Orwell is happy & Dr. Strangelove is finding ways to love the groupbomb.
The strange fetish of community building vogue in the commerce world can be seen in today’s WSJ - an article on P&G and bunco (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117012716314991917.html.html?mod=mm_main_promo_left)
Reading this, I found myself repelled by P&G’s seeming manipulation, but also admiring the intentional way they seem to have approached it.
This is fertile but risky ground we are treading on - my hope is that we begin, as human beings first, respecting existing communities and the bonds that unite & bound them.
I think this post — and the conversation — is spot on. How do we engineer/create/make the environment that allows community to take root, blossom, flourish — all those other words.
I think a lot of the ways that corporations are looking at community is by engineering ways for individuals to support a cause when they are paying for a product (Product Red anyone). Those causes may be great and need money but that isn’t engagement. It also isn’t engagement for companies to ask for ad submissions that they play during the superbowl. There’s something that’s missing that’s about giving people an opportunity to make unique local value out a product and to have real conversations about its use and then to build connections around that.
Wish I new what is was…
Hey, thanks! but I don’t do all customer service, just a significant slice.
Craig
When I was a programmer for CompuServe about 15 years ago, I was told that someone did an analysis and found that there was about a 9:1 ratio between lurkers and posters in most fora.
A few years later, a Net News server sysop told me that he’d done an analysis, and found that there was about a 9:1 ratio between those who lurk and those who post.
I’ve since moderated a number of bulletin boards. Guess what? There appears to be nine lurkers for every poster.
A funny thing, though. One of the bulletin boards I ran was for singles. There’s a high turnover rate there; as singles find each other, they’d drop out, and when they broke up, they would return. When a poster would drop out, a lurker would promote himself to poster. When a poster would return, a poster would demote himself to lurking, so the ratio didn’t change much.
There’s a critical mass, though. There’s a joke that if you put two fundamentalists together, they form a church. Add a third fundamentalist, and one of them breaks off and forms a schism denomination. The same thing works with communities, although the numbers aren’t quite as inflexible. You seem to need a critical mass of at least 3-5 posters in order to maintain a conversation. If you have more than that, at some point in time, you end up with multiple overlapping conversations. If you have less than that, there’s not enough conversation and everybody wanders off.
That’s sorta like the dynamic with the “hot” nightspot, where this week’s club is too crowded to get into, while last week’s club is abandoned.
In any case, I’ve observed that it’s a mistake to add a bulletin board to a website with a lot of fora in it. It’s easy to add a forum at a time later, but if you start with too many fora, you’ll never achieve critical mass, and if you try to expand the number of fora too quickly, you’ll lose critical mass.
I think that’s why blogs have been rather more successful than wikis and bulletin boards. You have one channel of conversation, which coalesces around one hopefully-charismatic writer.
(Tara, you indicate in your ma.gnolia links that AmishHosting doesn’t have an RSS feed, but in fact, it does, at
I use SharpReader, which is awfully good at sussing out RSS feeds, so I never noticed that I wasn’t making the RSS feed URL obvious.)
Speaking of going back to basics, how about we don’t take photos of people who, generally speaking, don’t want their photos taken?
I’m just being cheeky, and I know it’s not your photo, but there’s probably a community lesson in that as well. Great post, regardless.
Tara, good solid post, but I have to wonder if you are approaching “communities” and “companies” from a narrow perspective. You wonder why all the “new” business leaders are on the leading edge of joining communities. My guess is that their businesses grew out of answering a need online of communities they were a part of. But most companies operate offline. And will continue to because they provide physical products and services. Coca Cola, Starwood Hotels, Ikea, Wal-Mart, etc. They have overhead and severe rules and regs to deal with that have been implemented over decades. They have physical communities that attend events, go to their stores, run for the cause, etc. Their “leaders” have a larger sphere to deal with than the sphere Craig does for example. Do they have a lot to learn? Sure. Absolutely agreed. But comparing them to the 2.0 guys and gals seems not to present the full picture. Hopefully the 2.0 folks aren’t using child labour to make their products, but a lot of bricks and mortars businesses do. It isn’t hopeless, but it’s a much tougher sell to the Street to be socially responsible when there isn’t a pressing bottom line business need to do so.
Anyway, good post and food for thought. Also a good point by Darren.
Cheers,
Tamera
Thanks for clarifying Craig! I’m sure all of them would be more than even YOU could handle.
You mentioned one thing to me ages ago Tara which I always try to bear in mind when thinking about community (I hope I don’t get this wrong!!), but “the single best way to sell someone something is by NOT selling them something”.
Pure genius…and says so much about the philosophy behind Pinko and community.
Hope the Ebola has cleared up!!
For me it is about a generation of leaders who are filled with passion and purpose and have the technology tools as well as a receptive audience to share their visions globally. This was not possible on the scale it is now even 10 years ago.
We are at the beginning of a global revolution in communication the likes that have not been seen since the printing press, radio, and TV. It is an incredible time to be playing and taking on changing the world for the better. These new leaders do not have the same baggage because they exist/created themselves within a new realm made possible via technology. In many ways, they always existed, now they have a chance for their voice to be heard.
Great post! You inspired me to write this:
Creating a Community while Keeping it Real
Thanks
Tara
This post is timely for me. Starting next week I am moving into a new role at my (large/traditional) company. I am going to be the social media guy, so I don’t know if that makes me one of the good guys for trying to introduce communities to a big company or one of the bad guys for enabling another bull to enter the china shop. But good or bad the journey begins. I will link to this post on my dark blog and I am going to do everything I can to educate, educate, educate! Wish me luck.
Lee
Excellent post and discussion.
In regards to Paul Ding’s comment about forums and channels of conversation, I wrote about that which you might find interesting.
In regards to Tara’s blog (similarily about Paul Ding’s comment), I was also inspired to write about it here
(apparently I’m a fan of Paul Ding’s comments)
My kid sister is coming to the Bay area this weekend.
She is the Customer Service Rep of the year for Charles Schwab. She worked with clients in the New Orleans area during Katrina, helping them move and save assets, staying 14 and 15 hours a day to try to help them prevent loss. Now they are flying her out to meet “Chuck,” on Thursday.
She was hoping to find some local favorites in the Bay area for food and entertainment. So I thought I’d ask your community for some suggestions. You can post it on my blg: Global-Netizen if you have any suggestions. Thanks in advance.
http://global-netizen.blogspot.com/
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