Building a loving community in 3 steps: Show, Listen, Enable
A community is a sum of people liking and following you. Being engaged is commenting, reacting, playing a video.
Are you satisfied with those definitions? Good for you. If you aren’t, you may read further.
“Build a movement, not a company”
“Get 100 people who love you — not 1,000 who kinda like you.”
— Tristan Pollock, Venture Partner @500Startup
You probably have some thoughts about who you are, why you do what you do, maybe which problem you solve, and how it could be interesting to other people.
But, so far, this is invisible to your community. We’ll see how to deliver this to your community. A community, who will end up embracing your core values, and loving you for what you stand for.
Here’s how to gather and excite those people, in 3 not-so-simple steps.
1. Show
You are what you tweet. “The medium is the message”. Of course, your words and pictures speak for you. This part happens underwater: once you’re clear with your purpose, you define your conversational identity before speaking to the community.
Imagine you stand for “real encounters”, like a brand I used to work for. You may set up a few rules like: use words like “friends, meet, appointment” as often as possible ; don’t ever publish a picture of someone alone.
Be real about it. So also define the flexibility of your rules: maybe up to 5% of assets with someone alone, available for an encounter, is fine.
2. Listen
You don’t decree what’s worth fighting for. You just suggest it, and hit an underlying cause — or you don’t. That’s why you need to adjust your purpose to your community.
In addition, this adjustment will make you gather precious insights about what your community thinks about your organization, and what is really perceived as its cause.
With this brand about friendly encounters, we were surprised how the community was friendly to each other — even though they never met before. A few users actually came to our Facebook page every morning to say hello, and chat casually.
This wasn’t something we expected. We acknowledged this, and adapted our content, encouraging our community to interact with each other even more.
3. Enable
This is the best part. At this point, your cause is so pregnant, and your community is so excited about it, that they simply want to embody your purpose themselves.
Your job here is just to enable your community to do so. Empower them: weather it is by giving a role to your core users, or with fancy giveaways to the whole of your community.
This process can take long. The brand I take care of took a few years before offering the material and journeys to make encounters real. We simply had to wait for the moment when the community was excited enough to embody our core values.
The Heetch case
Ultimately, the people of the Internet would gather into communities, and choose which product will survive, and which one won’t.
Some companies like Heetch embrace a very obvious cause: getting the youth back to the Paris suburb at night — often after a party. This cause is key to their users, so they make a great, engaged, community.
- The #TouchePasAMonHeetch (don’t fuck with my Heetch) hashtag gathers top reasons why the service shouldn’t stop
- Various content emerged: pictures, videos, open letters
- An event was organized (with over 28k attendees, according to Facebook Event ;) )
All Heetch did was enable the community to support the service, with the TouchePasAMonHeetch website.
There are 3 causes to such a committed community:
- a super-strong cause
- something to fight against — together
- a great community engagement policy
I’d be glad to provide with some more examples from my experience. Feel free to contact me or visit my portfolio.
