Which way the chairs are facing
Issue 5: community ≠ marketing, scalable intimacy, and go-to-community strategy
Hi, I’m Emilie, and I’m launching this newsletter, Connection Engine, to discuss reflections and lessons on community building in a digital world. If you’re a community builder or just curious about community work, you can join the fun by subscribing below!
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Welcome to the fifth issue of Connection Engine! I’m really excited about today’s issue because it’s something every community manager has to explain at some point: community is not marketing. Community and marketing require two completely different mindsets. Try to make your brand’s community your audience and you’ve lost the game.
A community is a two-way street — your members interact with you, connect with each other, and play a key role in how your strategy and mission evolves. An audience is one-way. They watch, they read, and they consume, but they don’t directly influence the tone, nature, and strategy of how you build. An audience watches. A community interacts. Don’t call your consumers your “community” if they just purchase your product and otherwise have no sense of connection or belonging to your overall mission.
I love this thread from Greg Isenberg on the difference between audience and community:
Just because you have an audience doesn’t mean you have a community because your community is not your audience. I should also elaborate that this post is not meant to bash on marketing. Marketing is invaluable to business and requires creativity, flexibility, and an impeccable sense of being able to read the room. But marketing is not the same as community, and you shouldn’t combine the two.
So what’s the difference between marketing and community?
Marketing vs. community
The distinction between marketing and community can be a difficult one to make, especially when considering how community can eventually, like marketing, convert members to customers and drive your business forward.
The main difference I see between marketing and community, having done both, is that while marketing is a one-way strategy designed by a company to sell a product or a service, community is a two-way street to improve your members’ lives regardless of if you sell them your product.
“Users, audiences and customers are not the same as communities. The former exclusively participate as consumers. However, community members are collaborators, contributing to the ecosystem. It’s a distinction between active participation and passivity.” - Richard Awoyemi
Some other important differences:
Marketing is company-led; community is member-led
Marketing is usually top-down; community is always bottom-up
Marketing is outcome-focused; community is journey-focused
Marketing treats the audience as consumers; community treats members as collaborators
Marketing prioritizes company value; community prioritizes member value
Marketing directly impacts sales; community indirectly impacts sales
Marketing is transaction-driven; community is value-driven
Put simply, your community members are not your target sales audience. Imagine showing up to an event to only have it be filled with those relentless sidewalk salespeople shoving flyers in your face. Would you ever attend another one of those events? Approach your community building and design in the same way. If the space is designed to feel like a sales space, you have an audience, not a community. Share the pie:
Scalable intimacy
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: community work takes time. You are building trust and organizing efforts around a mysterious and unpredictable force: people.
So why would a company invest time and resources into community building?
I’m going to introduce a concept here I’ll call scalable intimacy, which I define as the practice of building upon the trust established in intimate relationships to find success and value extending beyond the relationship itself. How does scalable intimacy work? It builds upon the confidence established in community to grow value outside of the community itself. The intimacy fueled by your community translates to a shared sense of belonging that ultimately helps your community thrive and grow.
Scalable intimacy uses the unwavering commitment seen in solid relationships to grow the membership base and extract value from your community. This only happens when the right level of confidence and comfort is reached within the community, so before you can expect scalable intimacy to take place you have to make sure your community has the right foundation.
Some things that come from scalable intimacy:
Improved brand recognition & awareness
Direct feedback & feature suggestion
Membership growth & referrals
Brand loyalty & retention
Team support & mission dedication
Member conversion
Scalable intimacy depends on trust. Gaining trust is no easy feat which is why building a community from the ground up is often more time-consuming than launching a marketing campaign to a targeted audience. To scale intimacy is to build complete trust. And to build complete trust is to not push your product onto your members.
Developing a go-to-community (GTC) plan
With this important distinction between marketing and community and the rise of community-driven projects, it’s important to think about how a go-to-community (GTC) can benefit your company. Many businesses spend a lot of time developing a go-to-market (GTM) strategy and often group community as part of this plan. This is a mistake.
Not every business can afford the time and resources put into growing a well-designed community, but a solid GTC plan can help align the value generated between your business and your community and create a sustainable community plan.
Orbit CEO Patrick Woods has a few great pieces on GTC strategy:
“Community considers the entire audience around a product – even those who may not qualify as a qualified lead in the short term. And rather than capturing value from these people, GTC seeks to create value with and for them. Rather than discarding them to email drip campaign limbo, as you would in a funnel-driven GTM process, GTC embraces the idea that these folks are still valuable, both to the community and to the business.” - Patrick Woods
A lot of the questions for your GTC strategy will have already been answered in your initial strategy doc, but here are some more to guide your process:
Who is your community persona?
What value is the community creating for the member?
What value is the member creating for the community?
How will you define success and measure community growth and engagement?
How are you thinking about retention and incentive design?
How will feedback, suggestions, and questions from the community funnel to the product team?
How will you facilitate community traditions and rituals?
How can the business improve the community?
How can the community improve the business?
When done right, your GTC strategy will work independently, but alongside, other company strategies and directly influence business decisions:
“The relationship between GTC and GTM is synergistic, not synonymous. Community must be treated as a separate organizational entity, with its own measures and its own people. But there also needs to be permeable boundaries between the community and other parts of the company, so the community is not drifting off on its own, siloed and unconnected to the business.” - Patrick Woods
As more brands are discovering the value of community in a world of bottom-up expansion and recommendation feeds, I’m sure we’ll see more and more GTC plans emerging alongside GTM strategies. You can easily replace or sell a product. You can’t easily replace or sell relationships, trust, and loyalty.
After diving deeper into the objectives behind marketing and community, it’s clear that there’s a distinction between the values, strategies, and business impact of both marketing and community.
Remember that in community, you’re building with and for your members. Value creation takes time, but I think the saying goes that good things come to those who wait (and also work really freaking hard in the meantime).
Thanks for being a part of Connection Engine! Until next time.
About me
I’m Emilie Kormienko, community designer at startupy. Why am I doing this? To share my learnings on community work, to learn more myself, and to make new internet frens :)
Want to read more? Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my newsletter here.
Have a community question for a future issue or just want to chat? Email me at ekormienko@gmail.com.