Understanding the Community Opportunity (Community Value Part 2)

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.

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:

1. Customer lifecycle journeys: Where in the journey is community valuable?
2. Criticality of product / service engagement: Which community experiences are valuable, based on use of product or service?
3. 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 of an 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.