During Season 2 of the Cohere podcast, Dr. Lauren Vargas and I examined the role networks play in our lives – from the obvious to the subtle. In Season 3, Lauren and I are exploring the topic dominating the discussion of our collective digital future: the Metaverse.
Our intention is to have a discussion will go beyond the hyperbolic (and eye roll-inducing) to have a forward-looking yet practical discussion of what our connected future looks like in a world of ambiently available digital networks – and what this means for us as individuals, citizens, societies, and as part of globally connected humanity.
Topically, we are opening up the aperture to look at the interconnected components that make up a future Metaverse, including the technology trends, societal impact, and what the Metaverse means for future forms of community, collaboration and community leadership.
The current Metaverse is a mirage. The pursuit of the Metaverse vision could lead us to a better Internet.
Ep 1. Exploring a Betterverse
On the first episode of Season 3 of the Cohere podcast, we (Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas) frame of this season’s topic: the Metaverse.
As they did with “community”, Facebook’s announcement of the company’s move to focus on the Metaverse, and rebranding to “Meta”, set off a frenzy of conversation, speculation, and investment. Made in a move remarkably similar to their 2017 announcement that Facebook was a “community” company, it remains to be seen if Meta follows through with creating their version of the Metaverse. It is interesting to note that Zuck’s “Community” announcement from 2017 appears to have been taken down at some point in the past year (archive.org version here).
But this season of Cohere isn’t about Meta. It’s also not (solely) about VR, AR, XR, or related Web3 technologies – it is about the combinatorial effects all of these technologies and trends interacting to shape the next generation of the Internet, and more importantly, how we create a better Internet that is safe, equitable, accessible and inspires the best of human nature instead of exploiting the worst.
Ep 2. What Role Might NFTs Play In Future Communities?
Moving beyond punks and bored apes, NFTs have the potential to play a transformational role in future communities.
Ep 2. What Role Might NFTs Play In Future Communities?
On this episode of the Cohere podcast, we (Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas) discuss one of the hottest, potentially most overhyped topics right now: NFTs.
For the uninitiated, NFT’s (Non Fungible Tokens) are unique, digital, verifiable (blockchain-based) digital asset that records an exchange of value. In turn, the NFT itself (which records an exchange) can be exchanged. Said another way, NFTs are a “deed of ownership to a digital item”.
Much of the discussion from the past 2 years has focused on NFTs related to digital art – Crypto Punks, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Beeple are notable examples, but just scratch the surface of the massive volume of activity. The NFT market represented a staggering $23 billion in 2021.
The core of our discussion in this episode focuses on moving beyond financial speculation, what role might NFTs play in future communities and digital networks?
Ep 3. Do DAOs Hold the Secret of Orchestrating Collaboration?
Can DAOs address the current fallibility and idiosyncrasies of human collaboration to create better organizations and communities?
Ep 3. Do DAOs Hold the Secret of Orchestrating Collaboration?
On this episode of the Cohere podcast, we (Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas) discuss the early promise (and obvious issues) with DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations). Bill and Lauren have an in-depth discussion to try and separate the value and future utility of the DAO model vs. the current hype.
DAOs have been described as “digital flash mobs with money” by Raihan Anwar, manager of the Friends with Benefits DAO, and a blockchain-based “virtual entity that has a certain set of members or shareholders who have the right to spend the entity’s funds and modify its code” by Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum.
A recent article by Tarun Chitra on A16Z’s Future blog suggests that the key factors for forming a DAO vs a more “traditional” organization are curation, security and risk: “DAOs work best when the governance burden related to curation, security, and risk can be reduced faster than the natural increase in coordination costs that accompanies the need to have members involved in voting on every decision made.”
Metaverse Working Group
During the show, we mentioned convening a small workgroup for discussion, learning and sensemaking. If you would be interested in participating, please fill out the short form here to be considered.
As always, if you have comments, ideas, or want to suggest a guest or topic for the show, please feel free to send me a note.
In many organizations, community’s territory is often limited to an ill-defined middle ground between support and marketing functions. This can muddy the community value story, leading to a contributing – but not always reciprocal – relationship with other teams.
Further, community leaders struggle with a set of unique challenges when communicating community value: 1) they are required (more often than their peers) to demonstrate value for various invested stakeholders, 2) these stakeholder requests are often ad-hoc, contextual to a specific business function, and require specialized research, data manipulation and analyst skills that aren’t on the team or budgeted for, and 3) when the requested data and/or reports are delivered, they are often met with skepticism.
For example, we know that successful support communities can play an outsized role in deflecting inbound support cases, and therefore easing the burden on the support organization, saving the company money, and keeping customers satisfied. However, we routinely hear anecdotally that executives “don’t believe” the cost savings data, even when it is the statistically significant result of a sound, industry-blessed model.
Communicating Community Value to Stakeholders
With the reporting frameworks and examples in this series, you should be able to take a step toward establishing and reporting on your priority community measures that map to business value. The primary challenge remaining is how to best communicate your community’s impact to peers and executives, and advocate for additional resources and investment. Based on previous working sessions with our Cohere mastermind community, and firsthand experience in our practice, we suggest the following strategies:
Arrive at a clear definition for community at your company and socialize it. You’ll never be able to communicate the value of community if there isn’t a shared understanding of what community means at your organization. You need to make clear how community is both distinct from and supports other functions. A starting point could be defining community as a group of people that share a focus (interest, intent or objective) and have the ability and motivation to work together on the shared focus, over time. Particularly with brand or business communities, the core activity is generally about “getting to the next level” – moving forward on a journey towards growth, development and mastery. Your definition should answer the following questions: Who are the members or prospective members of this community? What is their relationship to your brand? What is the shared purpose or set of goals that links member and host needs? And what is your intent for this community? This definition will ultimately factor heavily into your vision, which is an aspirational statement of the future state of your community. Need additional help & guidance? Download our Community Strategy & Program planning templates here.
Position your customer community as a critical part of a larger business or digital transformation initiative. We know from the ’19 Altimeter Digital Transformation Survey that executives are, with respect to digital transformation, most interested in providing a unified, frictionless experience across all customer touchpoints. Community touchpoints and content are critical aspects of the digital ecosystem, and therefore must be integrated across channels rather than existing as a siloed platform to store and source knowledge.
Collaborate with other business units to reach a shared understanding of the value community can deliver for the entire company. As former Mars director Carlos Valdes-Dapena stated in a recent Harvard Business Review article “Quality collaboration does not begin with relationships and trust; it starts with a focus on individual motivation.” For community to break free from its silo and be integrated across the organization, it requires cooperation and collaboration with other teams. But first, these teams need to understand how supporting community programming will help them meet their own goals.
Develop a draft value presentation and enlist a trusted stakeholder outside of your team to give critical feedback. Perhaps as important as finding willing collaborators is identifying someone senior within your organization who both wants you to succeed and can offer constructive criticism of your value narrative, methods, and measures. The right person, like a good editor, can help you refine your pitch and strategy to increase its efficacy with executives and in implementation.
Deliver regular, timely reports for executives that clearly articulate the value of community. We recommend ensuring that community be part of a QBR (Quarterly Business Review) process, whereby you would pull together a community-specific quarterly review for interested senior stakeholders, and an annual review for C-suite. These presentations should:
Use executives’ own language and priorities
Include the voice of the customer
Demonstrate the holistic value to the company
Reveal a progressive community roadmap and plans to increase value over time
Integrating Community Into the Fabric of the Business
To further illustrate the concept of value exchange among community and other teams, we’ve documented the role each business unit can play with respect to community, what they can expect in return, and how to keep them in the loop on community initiatives. Keeping Internal Stakeholders Engaged In (and enthusiastic about) Community
A Portfolio Approach: Balancing Investment and Performance
Two key themes in this series, as they relate to developing a new value story for Community, are: a) it is valuable to look at the opportunity for community development in the widest possible sense and b) that community efforts must strike a balance of meeting customer needs while aligning with the purpose of the business – community goals, analytics and the community value story must ladder up to overall corporate objectives and business unit goals.
One advantage of this alignment is the ability to create a bigger picture with customer profile and account activity data, and understand community activity, contribution and value in relation to other customer touchpoints. For instance, understanding how a customer’s digital activity (corporate website, social media, self-paced learning and community activity) relate to product usage frequency and depth of feature use, as opposed to many current approaches where those touchpoints are looked at in isolation, by different business owners.
Although there currently aren’t “off the shelf” comprehensive models and tools for measuring the relative impact of community in the context of (and compared to) the range of other customer touchpoints, there are related models that offer valuable direction on potential paths forward. These methods take a portfolio approach – looking at individual touchpoints and activities as they relate to other, complementary touchpoints.
In particular, marketing mix modeling has been used to establish a econometrics model for community impact on sales size, velocity and amplitude (Dell, 2011). marketing mix models “are based on microeconomic models of product demand linking business outcomes to marketing investments. Once the appropriate demand structure is specified, the next step is the quantification of sales response to variation in each of the marketing mix investments. This is the focus of econometrics – a statistical regression-based procedure to estimate the parameters of the theoretical demand functions.” (“Econometrics in marketing mix modelling” 2013)
While extending Marketing Mix Modeling can give a comprehensive and precise view of the revenue impact of community, there are a few key challenges to be aware of:
A thorough Marketing Mix Model development exercise requires a large amount of data from the full range of customer touchpoints to be measured, as well as an economist to build the model;
Model development can also be cost-prohibitive, as projects can easily require 6-7 figure budgets;
Models are snapshots in time and do become inaccurate over time
The question of correlation vs causality often surfaces when exploring the impact of community engagements on customer behavior. Marketing mix modeling is one of the few certain ways we know to get to a relative financial impact vs other marketing spend. Doing A/B testing is the best option for establishing causal effect, but is obviously problematic on a “live” community, for a number or reasons. Developing synthetic control groups via “look alike” cohorts of member / non members, or split testing beta features are potential workarounds.
The next few years will likely see greater coordination of data management, analysis and reporting across all customer-facing functions to develop the next generation of methods and tools needed to more easily quantify community impact and guide future investment. Holistic approaches that combine customer data from multiple sources & touchpoints, like marketing mix modeling, provide a solid methodological baseline from which to start.
In Summary
Throughout this series, we’ve sought to document the current state and highlight future possibilities for better understanding, measuring, and communicating the value of brand communities. Through Structure3C’s work experience, a literature review of academic studies and business publications, and the collective wisdom and practices from our Cohere workgroup participants, we’ve provided recommendations for:
Positioning community as a competitive differentiator and guard against the potential negative effects of disruption;
Understanding the total addressable market and most relevant contexts for your community efforts;
Developing a community strategy that is both forward-looking and aligned with the language and objectives of your unique business;
Setting measurable goals for your community that ladder up to your community and corporate vision;
Developing formulas for value metrics that extend beyond community health and map directly to business outcomes;
Embracing a portfolio approach to achieve buy-in across business units and prioritize community investments;
Communicating and reporting on community value to C-suite and other stakeholders across teams in a clear and timely manner.
As stated above, many organizations are missing the community opportunity because of a short sighted focus on transactional value in the context of specific use cases. Growth-minded companies are fully embracing community as a concept and integrating community-building practices into the fabric of their business with great success. The guidance in this series should help you plot your journey toward the latter.
I hope you have found this series on Community Value helpful – if so (or if you would like to discuss your community strategy) please message me.
The best way to stay up to date when new posts come out? Subscribe to the Cohere newsletter.
This post (part 3 of a 4 part series) builds on the concepts outlined in “A Perspective on Community Value“ and “Understanding the Community Opportunity” and illustrates a process for developing a community strategy, as well as how to think about goals, co-created value and analytics related to community strategy. I’ve also included many examples and tools from our work developing community strategies for large global organizations at my firm Structure.
Developing Community Strategy
The (mildly) unintuitive thing about developing community strategy is that it is both a collaborative process (that guides the overall effort) and a set of tools and methods (to develop the actual content of the strategy). The process model we (Structure) use is based on a set of methods that informed the development of what we now know as “design thinking” – in short: community strategy development as a creative design exercise.
In our experience, the specific framework and labels matter less than these essential components and attributes:
An aspirational vision for the future state. You need to know what you are hoping to achieve with community and how both your customers and business will benefit from these efforts. (Generally developed in the Research and Definition phases listed above)
A list of concrete methods for achieving that vision. Choose your preferred terminology, and decide which specific programs, strategies and tactics you will deploy to reach your goals. These methods should ideally be derived from customer research that reveals their needs and willingness to contribute to community content and activities. As illustrated in the shared value diagram (below), community value is created where member needs and offers overlap with those of the host.
Key measures to track progress. You need to develop a series of indicators that are directly impacted by your priority methods and roll up to report on progress toward your vision. Specific guidance on developing these measures is included in the next section.
The community strategy development process should be participatory – including stakeholders from within the organization as well as external stakeholders (customers, partners, institutions). We (Structure) typically facilitate design working sessions to explore, interrogate and develop answers to the key questions raised in the development process.
I’ve included two MURAL templates below (think virtual whiteboard) that can help guide strategy working sessions, the first to explore the future vision for a community, and the second to guide initial definition and decision making:
Your community’s purpose should guide all decisions – it is your intention (and commitment) for hosting and participating. Your vision is an articulation of the desired state of your community 3-5 years out. Naturally, as markets and business strategies change, this vision should evolve over time. Methods and goals for your community should reflect the current and near-term scope of your community program, with an eye toward expansion and growth based on value produced and opportunities presented. The challenge in all of this is balancing organizational objectives and strengths with customer needs and behaviors.
Community initiatives generally comprise one or more of the following types:
Customer Support & Success. Forums and knowledge base content to answer customer questions, deflect support cases, and improve customer usage of the product.
Partner Engagement. Arming partners and resellers with the tools and support they need to be successful.
Advocacy. Identifying, empowering, and rewarding top customers who evangelize on behalf of you and your offerings.
Product Innovation. Spaces for product feedback, ideas, and co-creation.
Communities of Practice/Purpose. Connecting customers with shared roles and goals to improve practice and advance in their careers.
Knowledge Management & Collaboration (Internal). Tools and processes for sharing and discovery of explicit and tacit knowledge, and facilitating team collaboration.
Niche Social Networks (Corporate Alumni). Venues to encourage connections and sharing among contacts with a shared identity.
Goals for these different flavors of community can vary significantly, but regardless of the specific measures, they must clearly contribute to overall company success.
In Measure What Matters, John Doerr highlights this challenge:
Once top-line objectives are set, the real work begins. As they shift from planning to execution, managers and contributors alike tie their day-to-day activities to the organization’s vision. The term for this linkage is alignment, and its value cannot be overstated. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies with highly aligned employees are more than twice as likely to be top performers.
Unfortunately, alignment is rare. Studies suggest that only 7 percent of employees “fully understand their company’s business strategies and what’s expected of them in order to help achieve the common goals.” A lack of alignment, according to a poll of global CEOs, is the number-one obstacle between strategy and execution.
Measure What Matters – John Doerr
Doerr goes on to recommend a “cascading” approach to solve the alignment challenge, whereby a Key Result at for achieving a corporate Objective becomes the Objective for a team or business unit with its own set of Key Results and so on.
A Community-based OKR Example
An example of implementing this in practice for a community program could be as follows:
Corporate Objective: Expand product usage among new demographic
Key Results:
Identify key product needs and use cases for this demographic
Improve brand awareness among this demographic by X%
Convert Y% in demographic from trial to subscription
Customer Success Objective: Convert Y% in demographic from trial to subscription
Trial version of product released
Create/update user-centered product documentation inclusive of target demographic
Respond to 100% of customer questions regarding trial product
Community Objective: Convert Z% in demographic from trial to subscription (via community)
Key Results:
Trial version of product exclusive to community members released
Community nurture campaign for trial customers in this demographic implemented
(Significant #) of trials among this demographic initiated via community
Framing Goals: Reach, Participation and Impact
There are myriad ways to categorize goals and analytics – we’ve found in our practice that keeping these categories fairly simple is a helpful way to organize. Consider leveraging the model of Reach (performance to TAM/TOM), Participation (meaningful activity in the community), and Impact (valuable outcomes and externalities from community participation).
How Reach, Participation & Impact might show up in an Analytics dashboard – you can images click to enlarge.
Establishing SMART Goals
In establishing specific goals, we recommend adhering to the time-tested advice from George T. Doran, first published in the November 1981 issue of Management Review:
Ideally speaking, each corporate, department, and section objective should be:
* Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
* Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
* Assignable – specify who will do it.
* Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given the available resources.
* Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.
Notice that these criteria don’t say that all objectives must be quantified on all levels of management. In certain situations, it is not realistic to attempt quantification, particularly in staff middle-management positions. Practicing managers and corporations can lose the benefit of a more abstract objective in order to gain quantification. It is the combination of the objective and its action plan that is really important. Therefore serious management should focus on these twins and not just the objective.
From Q4 of 2018 through Q1 of 2019, we (Structure) convened a small working group of Community & Digital business leaders to share their strategies for measuring and articulating community value. During the working sessions, several participants shared specific community measures that mapped to business impact. These are documented in the table below, along with the formulas used for calculation.
* (Total Customer Visits to Content Pages) x (Survey Success Rate) x (Survey Contact Support Rate) = Estimated Cases Deflected * (# Deflections) x (Cost/Incident) = Cost Savings from Deflections
Product Innovation
* # Ideas Contributed * # Votes * # of Original/Valuable Ideas * # of Ideas Implemented * # of mentions in press / online / social
* (Sample of Original Ideas Implemented) x (Revenue from Ideas) / (Total Contributed Ideas) = Average Value of an Idea * (Total Value of Ideas) / (Program Budget) = Innovation ROI
Community-based Advocacy (MVP)
* # of Advocates * Advocate Productivity (e.g. # monthly posts) * Advocate Quality (e.g. * Accepted Solutions Rate) * % of Questions Answered by Advocates * # of acts of unpromtped advocacy
* (Hourly Rate of Staff Contractor) * (Hours Contributed by Advocates) = Estimated $ Contributed * (Estimated $ Contributed) / (Program Budget) = Advocacy ROI * NPS of (active) Community Members vs. Non Members
Customer Loyalty & Revenue
* Customer cohorts * participating in community * revenue participation * revenue impact
* Spend of (active) Community Members vs. Non Members * % of steps community is in purchase path / revenue (micro-econometrics) * Q/Q or Y/Y comparators of behavior, by account, relative to community engagement
This post covered a lot of ground in describing an approach to the community strategy development process, how to think about the specific value co-created in communities, and how to measure and articulate that value.
In the next (and final) post in this series, I’ll cover how to communicate the value of community to your organizations, and how to ensure you sustain interest and investment in the community over time.
I hope you have found this post helpful – if so (or if you would like to discuss your community strategy) please message me.
The best way to stay up to date when new posts come out? Subscribe to the Cohere newsletter.
We’ve been hearing a lot about the “Metaverse” in the last few months, and the conversation has reached somewhat of a fever pitch this week with Facebook announcing an upcoming rebrand to position the company as a “metaverse company”.
The concept of a fully-immersive digital reality isn’t new. This has been a staple of speculative fiction for decades, and we’ve had working hardware since the 90’s. For me personally, the idea that there was a world inside the machine was imprinted on my brain since I was a kid – I had the fortune (misfortune?) of seeing TRON around the same time I got my first personal computer.
Flynn being “scanned” into cyberspace by a malevolent AI that was created by an unethical corporation seeking world domination.
In recent public and private conversations, one important way my thinking has evolved around the concept of the Metaverse is that it isn’t necessarily a full immersive experience (VR). If you think about Metaverse as *any* digitally-mediated experience that you interface with through any device, and certain aspects of that experience are persistent (identity, wallet, etc) things get really interesting. In many ways, most of us have been living in the metaverse since March of 2019. All of this makes it especially sinister that Facebook wants to own this experience… especially since they’ve done such a good job with creating positive outcomes through social networks </sarcasm>.
There is so much more to unpack around this concept – what I have to offer today is a short conversation I had with Dr. Lauren Vargas yesterday, We will certainly be discussing this topic in more depth the coming weeks and months.
Note: this is the second in a series of posts about community value. If you missed “A Perspective on Community Value“, I’d recommend starting there.
Florence: a city that knows a thing or two about community, opportunity and value
In the last decade, many companies have come to understand how valuable (and critical) their direct relationships with customers are. The most strategic organizations understand that these relationships are part of a larger network – the hub and spoke model, with the company at the center – is very much a thing of the past.
These “networks of relationships” amongst customer, prospects, partner and employees are often largely unactivated – primarily because companies don’t understand the potential value and how to begin to explore the possible opportunities. They often have trouble envisioning a future state of their community because a) they can’t see beyond the “traditional” model of support-based communities or b) they lack the internal capability and skill to lead a comprehensive discussion. In our work at Structure3C, we’ve found that understanding and discussing the following three contexts is a helpful way to begin the conversation.
In the simplest terms, the three contexts are:
Customer lifecycle journeys: Where in the journey is community valuable?
Criticality of product / service engagement: Which community experiences are valuable, based on use of product or service?
Total addressable community: How many people can you expect to participate in your communities?
1. Customer Lifecycle Journey – Career Journey (as an initial model)
Understanding your customer relationship lifecycle, by persona, will provide helpful context to envision where in the set of journeys community may play a valuable role. We will use a career arc as a specific example here, but one can envision other scenarios beyond enterprise software, like the lifetime relationship a customer might have with a technology brand like Apple.
Example: Think about the career arc ofan Industrial Designer using Autodesk’s Fusion 360 design software. Throughout her career, the designer will progress from primarily designing, to leading a small team of designers, to “owning” the design function at a company (the Skilled Practitioner arc in the diagram below). This designer’s peer may start off in design but decide she would prefer to focus on leadership and progresses through to become the CTO or CMO of the company (the Executive arc in the diagram).
Considerations:
Number of distinct Customer Profiles (~Personas)
Entire career journey, length of career, and the stages in that career journey
Key Questions:
What role might community play in each career transition point?
How does / could the community support development and transition?
Can your organization support the full Customer Career Journey, or does it make sense to partner with complimentary organizations?
2. Engagement with Product by Customer Profile, Over Time
Understanding the depth of product / service engagement by customer profile can give insight into the level of effort, the specific motivations, and the needed resources customers need to master your product, and by extension, advance in their career. This understanding can guide what community experiences you offer (and what community investments you make). Consider the previous example of an Industrial Designer who would be using design software tools most of her day early in her career, but would likely manage tool users later in her career. Her relationship with the tools changes over her career, and her needs related to skills development and learning change as well.
Considerations:
Complexity of product / services
Effort required to attain skills / mastery
Amount of time spent using product / service
Amount of time spent in surrounding ecosystem – courses, conferences, meetups, online content, expert communities, etc.
Key Questions:
How much time will the customer spend mastering product / services and necessary skills?
How much time will the customer use the product in their work?
How much time is it reasonable to expect a Customer to spend participating in your community weekly?
What form factor and level of effort is required for quality participation?
3. Total Addressable Community & Crowd
Lastly, back to the point made at the beginning of this post: customer, prospect, partner and employee relationships are all part of a larger network. Understanding how big that network is creates your “denominator”, or gives you a sense of the largest possible size of your community. What if you were able to connect with 25% of your customers and prospects – what might that look like? How many customer types are represented in that percentage? Would they all naturally interact in one community experience, or might you need to support multiple experiences by customer type and / or stage in the relationship?
Considerations:
Overall Market Size
Current Customer Base
Projected growth (ideally segmented by Customer Profile)
Target vs Current Community Membership (again, segmented by Customer Profile)
Key Questions:
How big is the total addressable market?
What % of active customers are targeted for community engagement?
What business value can be realized at scale?
How can the community business case be optimized by extrapolating investment vs return at scale? At what point does the investment vs return reach equilibrium? Go negative?
How does the Customer value proposition change at scale? Is there a true Network benefit, or flat / diminishing return at a certain point in the growth arc?
Next Up: Strategy
I hope you found the ideas in this post useful, and to a certain degree novel. My intention with this series is to help open the aperture a bit on how community strategy is considered, developed and implemented. I hope it is now clear that I’m advising an approach that considers the entire lifespan of customer relationships, the complexity (and exponential value) of thinking about customer relationships in networks (vs 1:1), and considering the dynamic nature of a customers relationship with a brand and products (and therefor, any potential community) over time.
Next up in the series: My framework on community strategy + planning templates for your 2022 community initiatives.
This is a follow up post for those that participated in the Adventures in Collaboration session for MURAL’s Hybrid series.
First off – thanks for attending!
Secondly – the screen resolution shared through Zoom isn’t as good as having access to the actual material, so I’ve included screenshots and the MURALs below for both of the cases I walked through… as well as a completely unapologetic love letter to one of my favorite books – “The Universal Traveler” by Koberg and Bagnall.
Community Leaders / Advocates
The first case study was the Community Leader session we ran with Atma Connect. It was an honor to be asked to assist the team with their strategic discussions that focused on pivoting their product and community model to be based on local (in country / community) leaders.
I’ve included a screenshot of the session MURAL below as well as a blank template should you want to run a similar session.
The second case described a research debrief / sense-making session we ran last year with our Cohere Mastermind community of brand community executives. After reviewing our 2020 report, we guided the group through an exercise to help envision and plan their own “expedition” to pilot AI initiatives.
The session went from reviewing highlights from the report:
To teeing up the concept of a pilot as an adventure / expedition:
Introducing the idea of anthropomorphizing AI as a super hero:
And finally moving into MURAL to explore concepts and plan an AI adventure (pilot).
I was introduced to the first version of this book in college. I was a fine arts major, and my freshman year (’90) Sculpture class read, discussed and followed the creative process outlined in the book.
At first I really didn’t get it, and it was frustrating to be made to study and follow a process, instead of just being… creative.
Over the years I’ve grown to appreciate the creative muscle memory the book (and the awesome and thoroughly updated 2nd edition) has created. If you want to dig in and explore beyond “Design Thinking” to design process and a holistic method for designing, well, anything – this book is for you!
This is the first of a five-part series on the topic of community value. The series is based in large part, on the output of a series of small-group working sessions and primary research that began in 2018, as well as learnings and observations from my career.
A Personal Perspective
I’ve worked with some form of community for the majority of my career. In 1999 I took a job with TechRepublic.com as “UX Program Manager” and spent 9 months helping design, build, launch and grow what would become one of the largest online communities of global IT Professionals. Community platforms, as we know them now, didn’t exist. We had to build everything from the ground up. A design for threaded discussions went from whiteboard to production over a weekend. Content editors played the roles of community managers and moderators – “community management” wasn’t a term of art yet. It seems quaint that for the first two years of TechRepublic we only cared about two numbers: uptime and membership.
My first taste of what might be possible with communities beyond answering technical questions was volunteering to be one of the first Fast Company Company of Friends organizers in Louisville KY in 2000. The FastCo mothership gave me a list of local subscribers, a discussion guide, some facilitation guidelines and an organizer’s button. We held the first meeting in a local business conference room, and frankly, I was amazed that anyone showed up (we had 15 people at the first meeting) and also impressed that we all had so much to discuss. The central topic was about how technology -especially the Internet- was changing business.
In 2001 I was offered the chance to move to California and work on an in-product community with Autodesk. The focus of the community was to support customer onboarding and product usage. Autodesk was the beginning of a personal journey to study the implicit and explicit value of communities to companies. That journey continued with Forum One, Dell, and now continues with Structure3C. Along the way I’ve studied and helped develop different methods and measurements for community value: the impact of forums on the support burden, the effect of community on NPS and LTV, the effect of community on purchase frequency and size, and much more.
In my opinion, ground zero for community analytics has been measuring the value of knowledge generated in online communities, particularly in the context of customer support. Over the years different approaches have been fielded for measuring this value in support communities, including the cost savings of customer labor vs staff, the value of a call deflection, the long-term value of a qualified or accepted answer, and possible causal effects of participation on customer behavior. Several thoughtful methods have been formalized and documented by platform vendors and industry experts. This “ground zero” problem seems to have been solved, and cyclically re-solved and re-quantified to the point of diminishing returns, like a community version of the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, we still have executives pushing back on the validity of the calculus, and the corresponding results. This is perplexing to me.
Keep in mind, the customer support scenario I describe above is arguably the most tested, proven and accepted (by community professionals) example of community value. Yet organizations continue to regularly debate this. When the conversation moves towards the value of community across customer lifecycle, and the potential value across business units our current methods, measurements and metaphors fail us.
It seems we missed something along the way in developing best practices for communities. Admittedly, it’s not a simple problem to solve, but the key problem areas seem fairly clear:
Community as a concept is still largely misunderstood by the extended organization;
Investments in social media activities have claimed large portions of budgets and resources and have been mistakenly viewed as the primary focus for community, as opposed to a component of the community ecosystem;
Community strategies are often independent of, and so therefore misaligned with, corporate strategy and have no clear connection to corporate goals;
Community as a function is separated from other customer-facing functions;
Well intentioned, but misguided community leaders sometimes intentionally try to keep their teams and the overall community at arms-length from the organization;
Community analytics and activities often don’t communicate value in the context and language of the business;
Because the community function is separated from the business, it is often viewed as a cost center, as extra overhead for extended teams, and is asked to quantify value and impact in unusual or extraordinary ways – often in an ongoing, and sometimes ad hoc fashion;
Hampered by the aforementioned factors, the final straw is that community analytics and data aren’t integrated technically or programmatically into enterprise analytics, data and reporting – a critical dimension of individual customer profiles and the ability to gain insight into entire market segments is wholly missing.
In Short: Many organizations are missing the community opportunity because of a short sighted focus on transactional value in the context of specific use cases. Growth-minded companies are fully embracing community as a concept and integrating community-building practices into the fabric of their business with great success.
The Value of Networked Businesses & Connected Customer Experiences
Organizations have engaged in various forms of online community development for well over 20 years, but questions central to the issues of strategy, investment priorities, performance analytics and business impact remain largely unanswered. The good news? An emerging body of research suggests that businesses that embrace community-building are more resilient and innovative, and that customers connected to a company’s community are more valuable customers. In the face of market disruption being driven primarily by exponential technologies, and in the midst of a range of business and digital transformation models intended to navigate market disruption, communities aren’t just a way to save a few million dollars in support costs – communities and networks are critical for future business success.
Connected Customers Are More Valuable
The 1:1 relationship between a company and a customer is increasingly perishable. The customer is blessed by an abundance of choice in the market, and increasingly (especially for technology) the lifespan of a company to customer relationship can last only days, weeks or months — not years. As an example: most software companies are moving from a perpetual license to term-based licensing that can be as short as 24 hours. Creating a great customer experience and minimizing churn are key.
One key strategy is to develop customer communities where customers connect to people in the business (as hosts) as well as other customers and prospects (as peers). This creates a network of many:many connections, where bonds strengthen over time and value is exchanged in the form of knowledge, content, advice and help.
These communities translate into real value for the customer and for the host business. Companies like Autodesk have found that community members were more loyal and more likely to recommend than non-members. Autodesk was also able to quantify cost savings from their support community to be several million dollars. Similar research at Dell, uncovered the fact thatIdeaStorm community members spent 50% more than non-members, and members’ purchase frequency was 33% higher than non-members. Community member ideas from IdeaStorm created $100’s of millions of dollars in revenue in the period between 2007–2011. Further, taking an account-based marketing approach, Dell was able to correlate patterns of community participation with increased purchase size and frequency on their TechCenter community for Large Enterprise customers.
Networked Companies Create More Value (and are more resilient)
In a 2014 article from Harvard Business Review, a study between Deloitte and a team of independent researchers examined 40 years of S&P 500 data to examine how business models have evolved with emerging technologies. The study had 3 key findings, including the emergence of a distinct new business model of “Network Orchestrator”. As defined by the study:
Network Orchestrators. These companies create a network of peers in which the participants interact and share in the value creation. They may sell products or services, build relationships, share advice, give reviews, collaborate, co-create and more. Examples include eBay, Red Hat, Visa, Uber, Tripadvisor, and Alibaba.
The study also determined that fewer than 5% of the S&P 500 qualified as a Network Orchestrator. This signals both an opportunity and underscores the urgent need for transformation, as the average lifespan of the S&P 500 has sharply declined from 90 years (in 1935) to just 18 years.
Another study by NFX found that in the last 25 years (since the launch of the commercial Internet) 70% of value in tech is driven by network effects.
“In other words, companies that leverage network effects have asymmetric upside. They punch above their weight. They are the Davids that beat the Goliaths, and then become the Goliaths.”
What both the ’14 Deloitte study and the NFX study point to is the opportunity for businesses to accept the network contexts they are already operating in, and to evolve their businesses to cooperative models that look more like communities than the hierarchical company / customer models of the industrial age.
Value to Members
One aspect of value creation that is surprisingly overlooked is the value created for community members. At its most basic, value can take the form of questions answered in a technical community – and this is where many organizations primarily focus. This unfortunate limiting belief is holding many community programs back and preventing the community from reaching its full potential.
Leading organizations have taken a more sophisticated approach, with a focus on the “whole” customer and the potential for a career-long relationships being developed and strengthened through the community. Although more difficult to quantify, these more sophisticated approaches yield value to the members in the form of career advancement, skills development and mastery, and in the very best cases, the ability for members to discover and actualize their purpose.
Next, think about what a community might look like if the host organization was actively refining and expressing its purpose through community interactions. As an example: If a software company’s purpose is to empower the world through digital design software, you could imagine community activities going well beyond break/ fix support forums and into eduction, skills mentoring and specific efforts to reach people in the developing world and the associated technological challenges. The host organization evolves from an authoritarian role to become a responsive partner in co-development.
When most Executives think about customer communities, there is an unfortunate tendency to view them as “cost saving” vs “value producing”. This misguided thinking leads to strategies and outcomes that fail to realize the full value of customer communities. This typically manifests in the form of a myopic focus on customer support communities and an overburdening of customers taking on the role of customer support agent. In extreme examples, this sort of strategy breeds resentment with valuable customers, and leads to a dangerous dependence on an unsustainable resource. When the Executive mindset shifts to “value producing”, the aperture of community strategy widens to a rich set of possibilities: community advocacy programs, open innovation, peer to peer mentoring, complex content sharing, co-design of products and much more.
As we enter into an increasingly digital & connected era, future-state communities will be key locations where value is co-created and exchanged between companies and customers. To have any chance of long term success with customer communities, mindsets have to evolve beyond a fixation on cost savings to a more enlightened view of communities as a valuable catalyst for growth.
In order for businesses to begin defining a future state community model, they should:
View community building as a capability and view their extended community ecosystem as a strategic asset;
Explore and define what “community” means in the context of 1) the brand and 2) the customer experience;
Understand how community can play a meaningful role during the entire lifespan of the customer relationship;
Develop a community strategy that aligns with, and complements, corporate strategy as well as customer needs;
Understand how the community ecosystem creates value for all business functions;
Develop a community ecosystem – a portfolio approach versus investing only in a destination community or a social media outpost;
Develop community programs, goals and KPIs that tie to Business Unit goals and objectives and are translated into team, manager and individual performance goals
Prepare to integrate community ecosystem data, analytics and insights into enterprise analytics, communications and annual & quarterly business reviews;
Most importantly: Be open to the possibility that as the community develops and becomes embedded in the fabric of the organization, the community can catalyze organizational transformation.
Upcoming posts in this series will explore:
methods for framing and sizing your community opportunity;
how to develop a value-focused strategy;
guidance on developing goals and measurements;
how to evangelize community, secure funding and sustain engagement in community investments.
The best way to stay up to date when new posts come out? Subscribe to the Cohere newsletter.
I feel very fortunate to have established a career developing communities (both on and offline) over the last 20+ years. During this time, I’ve seen a steady series of boom and bust cycles for “community” – large waves of investment and development followed by retreat and divestment. During the transition times between the cycles, one of my favorite questions to ask friends and colleagues in the space is: “Where are we on the map?”
We Need a New Map
We are in another period of community investment and growth, fueled in part by COVID-driven restrictions that prevent us from connecting in-person. There is also reason to believe that this wave will actually break the invest/retreat cycle we’ve seen since the late 90’s, and put community (as a concept, practice and industry) on a path towards sustainable growth and development. As such, we are largely entering new territory, and there aren’t maps for where we need to go.
Over the past 2 years, through a combination of primary research and a hosted Mastermind community (the Cohere project) I’ve been thinking about this new territory and how to begin our journey through it. In the post below I attempt to summarize my thinking by giving an overview of:
1. Three focal areas community leaders need to pay attention to;
2. The exiting of the long “Social Boom” and a notional look at what the next epoch of community might look like;
3. How community strategy is evolving
3 Focal Areas
There are many things that shape the opportunity and need for community development. Some are technical, some are societal, others relate to individual human behavior. The list below intends to highlight what I consider the three most important and consequential areas.
Global Internet access – in the next 10 years, the majority of the rest of the world will come online, bringing all the opportunities and issues we’ve witnessed in the developed world, along with a whole host of new ones. We (collectively) are wholly unprepared for this change in almost every way, with issues ranging from policy, to security, access rights and more.
2. “Humanity’s Graph”- Mark Zuckerberg’s stroke of genius was realizing that not only was an individual’s digital data incredibly valuable, but their network of relationships (both actual and possible) was as well. In the coming years, the pressure of competition, policy, technology and individual behavior will crack open these currently frozen and proprietary social graphs to create a global mesh that will essentially be “Humanity’s Graph.”
3. The impact of exponential technologies – Exponential technologies are defined as technologies that double in power and/or speed, or the cost drops by at least half annually. An example is the combinatorial effect of AI, machine learning and automation that not only shapes your experience on a social network like Facebook, but can also participate in that experience as a non-human actor.
Any one of these focal areas alone is powerful. We are literally struggling to imagine the combinatorial effect of all three.
The End of the Social Boom
Web-based online communities have been around since… well, the inception of the web. News to you? OMG read a book. Starting in the late-2000s, the grass roots dynamics of the early web (which felt very much like a giant community) shifted to increasingly centralized social media and social network sites and apps, with Facebook drawing the lion’s share of global attention and engagement.
For community leaders working within large brands, this myopic focus on social media has wreaked havoc on community programs – from creating dissonance around the concept of community, a misguided predisposition to invest in social media presences and the unfortunate tendency to relegate (and isolate) community programs to functional areas within the business, usually support. This is an especially vicious cycle, as “enterprise class” platform investments can be well over 7 figures annually, essentially creating community programs with multi-million dollar investments in people and tech that, at best, are just breaking even with their resulting cost savings. This practice stifles more strategic conversations about community strategy and the possible value of community.
Fortunately, we are seeing green shoots popping up everywhere that signal a community spring of sorts. From innovative (and lower cost) platforms, to community organizations being integrated into the fabric of the business. More nuanced conversations about the value of communities, and an equitable distribution of that value between host and member are being had.
As we exit the Social Boom, what’s next for communities? An era I’m optimistically dubbing “Transformational Communities” – one that centers on the power of communities to transform individuals, groups and organizations for the better.
The Evolution of Community Strategy
To begin to explore, and eventually inhabit, this new territory, we need we need new ways of thinking, new methods of practice and new tools.
In particular, we have to break out of the pattern of relying on technology to dictate strategy. Legacy community platforms are hyper-optimized for support interactions and social media platforms are optimize user attention – laggards are stuck struggling with native functionality. We need to understand where community can add value to individual customer experiences and shift our thinking to the possibilities of creating value throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer relationship – Leading programs are investing here.
Future growth opportunities will be unlocked through a more sophisticated approach to community development, where every stakeholder has the opportunity to participate, and the “network of relationships” is seen as both a valuable asset and a catalyst for transformation.
Exploring the Territory
If you are interested in learning more, there are several opportunities:
Listen to the Cohere podcast where Dr Lauren Vargas and I explore these topics;
Apply to join the Cohere Mastermind for community and customer experience leaders;
We’re well underway with Season 2, and I say “we”, because I’m joined this season by Dr. Lauren Vargas (also a Season 1 guest). Together, we are exploring the role networks play in our lives, and the range of disciplines studying networks, and the most important research focused on the emerging field of network science.
The reason for the focus on networks? Complex networks are springing up everywhere, driven in large part by increasingly ubiquitous internet access. Imagine what will happen when three billion more people come online in the next five years! For organizations, a planet-wide network of logged-on human beings brings both limitless opportunities and unprecedented threats.
As we increasingly use networked technologies to augment human experiences, the Cohere podcast asks, what’s the best path forward? What do we need to learn and understand? How might science and existing research guide us towards optimal norms and conditions? How should we navigate, evaluate, and administrate a complex technological landscape so we can protect, promote, and empower our human networks? How will we ensure that digital communities deliver on the promise of enhancing our lives, both individually and collectively? And what steps must we take to ensure our approach to community development is sustainable, equitable, and morally sound?
The first four episodes of The Cohere Podcast – Season 2 are out now.
Ep. 1 – Why Community Leaders Need to Understand Networks – With Bill Johnston and Dr Lauren Vargas
Ep. 2 – The Golden Age of Online Communities & the WELL with Gail Ann Williams
Ep. 3 – Building Communities with Purpose and Integrity with Carrie Melissa Jones
Ep. 4 – The “Great Connecting” Continues with Jim Cashel
It’s March (again). Congratulations on what is likely your pandemic lockdown anniversary month. Humanity’s re-emergence into whatever new normal awaits us has been on my mind for the last few weeks. Looking back on the last year, the closest analogy I can come up with is the concept of a singularity — the hypothetical point when technology drives unforeseen, irreversible, and uncontrollable change. We are passing through a similarly disruptive and consequential event, with the CV19 pandemic as a forcing function.
Consider:
One year ago, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the developed world almost instantaneously into mass adoption of online collaboration;
For the last year, our reality and relationship with the world at large has been almost exclusively mediated by digital media and tools;
We witnessed (in the US) the first-hand effects of bad actors using digital platforms to damage public health, democracy, and our shared social fabric;
The digital platforms that were catalysts for abuse and damage have gone largely unchecked and unpunished
Fleeing to the Virtual World
When we look back on the pandemic in the coming years, one area of focus will clearly be our relationship with technology during this period. In particular, we will need to examine the role the Internet played as a virtual proxy for the real world — our work, education, information, and entertainment. In a recent Financial Times article, Yuval Noah Harari contrasts the 1918 flu epidemic (lacking digital technology) with the COVID19 epidemic:
“ In previous eras humanity could seldom stop epidemics because humans couldn’t monitor the chains of infection in real time, and because the economic cost of extended lockdowns was prohibitive. In 1918 you could quarantine people who came down with the dreaded flu, but you couldn’t trace the movements of pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers. And if you ordered the entire population of a country to stay at home for several weeks, it would have resulted in economic ruin, social breakdown and mass starvation.”
It was very different with Covid-19. By January 10 2020, scientists had not only isolated the responsible virus, but also sequenced its genome and published the information online. Within a few more months it became clear which measures could slow and stop the chains of infection. Within less than a year several effective vaccines were in mass production. In the war between humans and pathogens, never have humans been so powerful.” Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid | FT Feb 25, 2021
While we’ve never been better equipped to respond to an epidemic scientifically, humanity has never been in a more vulnerable position in our relationship with digital networks. In the article cited above, Harari goes on to make the point that humans fled into the virtual world to escape the virus that was propagating globally. During our time in this mostly virtual world, humanity suffered through manipulation and abuse at a scale we’ve never experienced. As we start to contemplate a shift back to the real world, our digital health and well-being must be prioritized along with our physical health.
There are so many questions for community leaders to grapple with as we re-emerge into the “real world”:
What do our community members need from us during this transition?
How do we, as community leaders, play a role in healing or helping repair the damage done to our digital social fabric?
How do we reclaim the concept and intention the community from mass social media?
How do we center on our communities as we move our organizations forward?
And so many more
Navigating Disruption, Together
In March of 2020, when it became clear that the pandemic would cause global disruption, I recommended steps to take (a “Plan C” of sorts) to prepare community programs for the shift to lockdown. What I (or anyone else) couldn’t predict at the time were both the severity and length of the lockdown for most of the developed world.
Over the last year, I’ve run a number of small group sessions to help community leaders (including myself) navigate the pandemic-driven disruptive period we are in. The sessions have ranged from topical discussions to a small working group publishing the Better Communities manifesto and related initiatives.
In the spirit of these collaborative sessions, I’m starting a new series of sessions to discuss the issues, challenges, and opportunities for community development as we re-emerge from the pandemic over the next few months.
In particular, the sessions will focus on:
Taking stock of the last year of lockdown and lessons learned from your community and community practice;
Promoting positive mental health for community leaders and supporting community members that may be struggling;
Understanding the digital collaboration fatigue many are experiencing and discussing plans to address;
Discussing the role social platforms should play in community ecosystem strategies, and how we, as community leaders, can respond to the negative effects of these platforms through the power of our communities;
A return to first principles with communities — articulating and actualizing a shared purpose, centering community in our organization, ensuring inclusion in our communities, equitable value exchange, and creating sustainable programs.
Bill Johnston - Notes on Community... 