With the advent of countless social media tools to build bridges between people, it’s tempting to count click-throughs and page views to certify that we’ve completed our virtual public square. But building a true online community isn’t quite that simple.
To see what I mean, take a minute to think about community. If a community were just a place to stop, get out of your car for a picture, and then leave, it wouldn’t even be much of a tourist destination. It’d be more like a roadside attraction hawking the world’s biggest ball of twine: interesting for a minute, but once you’ve checked it off your bucket list, there’s no real reason to return.
Too many online “communities” are the same way–been there, done that, move on. And though that big ball of twine might have a lot of one-time visitors—the roadside equivalent of page views—it’s not a true community. Even on its busiest day.
What makes a place a community is its ability not just to attract visitors, but settlers—people who put skin in the game by adding their own energy, generating new ideas, and shaping how the place grows. And these settlers don’t always get along—they can be provocative, challenging, and at times downright annoying.
And they should be. If that idea makes you squirm, imagine the opposite scenario: a town where there’s never any controversy, never any intrigue. Let’s call it Likeville. Just like that big ball of twine, Likeville might be nice to visit, but living there would get pretty dull pretty fast.
Too often, our online communities are Likevilles—places where we want people to click a button to express their Facebook approval. That might be nice, especially if you want to keep up the appearance of virtual harmony. But if your community isn’t a place where settlers want to unpack their baggage and interact with their neighbors, you’re not
giving them an opportunity to shape their experience—or a reason to return.
There is hope for community builders, though. Pioneers like Elizabeth Lupfer, the founder of The Social Workplace, are working hard to help companies understand how social media can be applied to internal audiences to help companies truly engage and empower their employees. She combines her addiction (her word!) to social media and a common-sense understanding of community to create practical, useful, and often game-changing advice. For company leaders navigating a new, digital world, her insights provide guideposts for building a more dynamic public square.
My own employer, Gagen MacDonald, has spent years building communities within
corporations, tapping into the energy of executives and employees to construct
better places for people to work. We’re now doing the same thing digitally by
helping companies see that online communities aren’t just about choosing the
right tools, but creating the right conditions to attract settlers willing to add their own vitality and ideas.
What about you? Is your company’s internal social media building a true online community? Or just a big ball of twine?
6 Comments
The important thing about effective communities is that they already exist in some form, arising out of a shared need. You cannot point to a business activity and say ‘Let’s create a community around this process/function’. These are unlikely to succeed. Community building is about allowing that existing opportunity the chance to grow and flourish. A social media strategy that succeeds in that is likely to achieve its ROI…in my view.
Oops…that line was meant to read more like: ‘Community building is about identifying existing communities and helping them grow and flourish.’
Alister,
Good point. I’ve mentioned to a couple of our clients that building a social media strategy is a bit like building a subway: it needs to be built where there’s a population to use the service, and it has to go somewhere those people need to go. If you forget these things, you’ll be left with some shiny new platforms, but no one ready to get on board.
Alister,
One other thought: what do you say to people who suggest that some internal social media tools have actually succeeded in building a kind of community that no one could have anticipated using, the same way Facebook connects people who may or may not know each other in person? Do you think there are examples of invented digital communities? Or just extensions of what would naturally form if we were to remove the barriers of geography and function that exist in most large organizations?
Page views is to online community building what batting average is to winning the World Series. That is to say, based on bad conventional thinking and generally unimportant. If you’ve seen Moneyball, this makes much more sense.
And to extend the Moneyball metaphor, you get a lot more bang for your buck–whether you’re a baseball franchise or a major corporation–when you start looking at the metrics that actually produce bottom-line results. Too many corporations rely on conventional thinking, which means they invest in shiny, expensive social media platforms that end up missing the mark in building internal communities.