I'm David Spinks - I've fostered communities for 10+ years & wrote The Business of Belonging. AMA 📖

@rrhoover I love getting into the weeds on this stuff, especially with you ;) Yeah our lack of language around different kinds of communities is definitely a cause for a lot of confusion and frustration these days. People are using the word "community" to describe everything from a small group of friends, to all of their customers, to entire countries... What's interesting is that community is used both as a descriptor of a group of people (a community of Marvel fans) and it's used to describe a sensation, or feeling, that people have (to feel a sense of community). So whenever people get into the weeds about trying to define a group as a community, or not a community, I try to divert the conversation from describing the group toward describing the emotion. Do people feel a sense of community in that group? Then to them, it is a community. Now, I do think an improved classification system for kinds of communities would be very useful. We have some terminology like: - online communities - internet communities - communities of practice - communities of passion - small groups - customer community - circles etc... These kinds of terms do lend a little more specificity to the kind of community that we're talking about. And language can still be invented. It wasn't too long ago we didn't have a word for a "meetup" until Meetup came along and coined it. Now when someone says they're hosting a "meetup", you get a much more clear idea of the kind of event they're hosting and how it's different from a conference, a meeting, or other kinds of events. Language will always be evolving. I'm sure we're going to see a lot of new words coined in the world of community in the coming years.

@gabe__perez one concept I share in the book is called the "Community Commitment Curve". I learned about this tool from Douglas Atkin who ran global community at Meetup, and then Airbnb. When he was at Meetup, he was faced with a challenge where they wanted more members to host meetups. But when he went over the community member journey, he found that they were asking people to host meetups right after they signed up for platform. They were making too big of an ask, too quickly. The members weren't committed enough yet to make such a big contribution to the community. So he used the commitment curve to map out how over time, as a member's commitment goes up, they could make greater and greater asks. Simply put: start off by making small asks that are easy for the member to say yes to (ie. fill out your profile, introduce yourself, read a post, etc.) Then over time, you can make greater and greater asks. You can learn more about the commitment curve in this blog post: https://cmxhub.com/the-cmx-socia...

@davidspinks makes total sense, thanks so much for answering! Also, the blog is clutch. Going to share the Social Identity Cycle here for the community to take advantage of as well. · Identification. The person identifies with the community and is attracted to the social identity of the group. · Participation. The person takes some sort of action to participate in the community experience. · Validation. Participation is rewarded, making the person feel good about their participation and strengthening their sense of shared identity.

@davidspinks Firstly, thanks for doing the AMA, I think we can all agree, they're super valuable in so many ways.. so thank you for putting the time & energy into doing this. Wow. That response to that question was so spot on! I almost didn't read your response because I felt as if the question didn't pertain to me, but in all reality, your explanation was something that I had been needing for a long time. I want to say THANK YOU! You genuinely just changed my whole outlook on a big project that I'm working on right now! Thanks again, buddy! @gabe__perez - Bro, thanks for asking the question I didn't know how to ask but needed SOOOO BAD! I owe ya bud! You guys have a wonderful rest of the day - God BLESS! - Adam Madden Community Founder & Leader @ Side Hustle Discovery

@aaronoleary that I'm not bored of it yet 😅

@sharfunnisa_quadri I will humbly recommend my new book! http://cmxhub.com/book I wrote it to answer these exact questions (=

@utkarsh_bhimte It has to be active. "If you build it they will come" is never true in reality. You have to take a proactive approach to connecting with people, creating connections between members, facilitating discussions, hosting events, etc. For SaaS specifically, you have two options: - build community around your product (this only works if you have a lot of customers) - build community around the larger category Examples of building around the larger category are Hubspot's Inbound, Branch's Mobile Growth, Salesforce's Trailblazer community, etc. General rule: you can never force people to take actions. Figure out what they're intrinsically motivated to do, and make it as easy as possible for them to do that.

@samandarco that's a great way to build community. For some people, they'll get much more value out of being an active member of an existing community than building up an entire community themselves.

@tim_carambat thanks so much for reading the book Tim! WRT growth for communities and social apps, what I've learned is that it's really important to constrain the group you're focusing on at first to increase the odds that you'll get the critical mass required for people to experience the value of the app Airbnb started just in NY. Facebook started just in one college. Reddit started as one front page that primarily targeted developers. You can get more specific by location, interests, demographics, etc... By constraining the group, you can then experiment much more efficiently and affordably until you find community-market fit. When I ran community at a company called Zaarly, I think a big mistake we made was launching in too many cities at once. We spent millions on marketing but we had a "leaky bucket" and so our community wasn't being retained. If we wanted to try something new, it was hard, because we'd have to do it across all the cities we were in. Small is an advantage. While you're small, you can make the experience more intimate and personalized, you can learn a lot more, and build something that feels really special for your founding members. Once you find community-market fit with that constrained group, then you can start pumping marketing dollars into growing it.

@davidspinks It makes so much sense when you put it that way. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond! I really appreciate that!

@abhishek_kejriwal i would recommend diving into the data to understand exactly where they're dropping off. Are people joining and then dropping off right away? Then you might have an onboarding problem. Are people joining and then dropping after a few months? Then you might need to work on the content in the community and kick off some new rituals to keep people engaged over time. Or start hosting regular events to bring people back. Are people joining and then dropping off after a year? Then you might need to create new ways for people to engage in the community and take on leadership positions.

@alex_brik start by talking to the members that you want to reach. Before you build anything. Just get on the phone with 10 people and you'll learn an incredible amount about what kind of community you can build.

@dbustac first, you have to know what your business objective is. Don't fall into the trap of just measuring community engagement without understanding how that engagement leads to business impact. A useful tool I share in the book for measuring the business value of community is called The Spaces Model. You can learn more about it here: https://cmxhub.com/the-spaces-mo... Then, when you get into community engagement and health measurement, I look at three things: 1. Are members consistently participating? 2. Are they getting the value they expected? 3. Do they feel safe and welcome in the community? For participation, we look at things like total posts, comments, likes, and stickiness (DAU/MAU). For 2 and 3, we use surveys and interviews. Here's how we run community health surveys: https://cmxhub.com/how-we-run-co...

@younes_al most successful communities are built by people who were just solving their own problem. Start with the niche you have experience with.

@curio_revelio this is a great question that sits at the heart of a challenge so many people are thinking through right now. It's why I titled the book "The Business of Belonging". I wanted to dive into that tension between commerce and community. It can feel icky to mix community and profit. But in my opinion and experience, it's critical that community builders are able to monetize their communities. I've seen way too many community builders pour their heart and soul, and countless hours, into building their community, just to find themselves totally burned out because they couldn't hire more people, and invest the resources they need to make the community successful. There are many different ways you can monetize, that generally fall into three buckets: - charge for membership (eg paid subscriptions) - sell a product to members (eg software) - sell access to your members (eg advertising) Community building is extremely hard, emotionally taxing, and time-consuming work. It's time we shifted the mindset away from community being something that should just be done for free. Pay your community builders. On a membership level, money changes things. People are motivated to participate in communities not because of financial incentives, but because they feel an intrinsic motivation to build connections, to help others, to learn, etc. In the book, I talk about how when money is introduced, you switch the community dynamics from a "social norm" to a "market norm". According to behavioral economist Dan Ariely, introducing financial incentives can replace the intrinsic motivation that made someone want to participate in the first place. He described a scenario where a friend asks you to help them move. Of course, you'll do it, because they're your friend and you want to help them out. But if that same friend then offered you $100 to help them move, you'll now start thinking about it in terms of "market norms". You'll wonder, "Is it worth $100 for my time and energy? Why don't they just pay a professional mover?" This has been proven out in experiments, like one where lawyers were asked to do pro bono work for free and a percentage of them said yes. Then, when another group of lawyers were asked to do the same job, and they were offered payment that was far less than their usual rates, a much smaller number said yes. So you do have to be careful about how money is introduced into community. But without capital and resources, you'll never be able to reach the full impact of your community. It's about finding the right balance.