Welcome to the latest issue of Uncommunity - the newsletter that helps you become a better community builder. We bring you community experts’ interviews, content on communities, tools to scale community or events, and jobs to be applied.
This week’s guest is Todd Nilson, Digital Strategist and Founder of Clocktower Advisors. He has more than 10 years of experience building communities and has worked with companies such as SAP, Facebook, Activision, etc to activate online communities and digital workplaces.
Let’s begin. 🖖
More and more brands recognise the community as a competitive advantage. For many, it's a shiny object. What's your go-to strategy to check if a brand is ready for a community?
Have they thought about the community concept with any level of empathy and humility? If they are empathetic, they have considered what might be valuable for members of the community they’re thinking about. They might not know how to make it happen, but if they’ve got some level of empathy, that’s a good sign that they could be ready to begin the journey.
If they have the quality of humility, that means that they don’t feel like they already know everything. Have you ever tried to help a know-it-all? The arrogance of the mindset prevents you from doing them any good. The same goes for brands thinking about entering the space and it’s a good litmus test to see if they’re just hopping onto the community hype bandwagon, or if they are truly ready to do the work needed to make a community experience work.
What's your take on meaningful gamification in a community? What should a community leader avoid while creating a gamification plan?
For sure, they need to avoid just using the “out-of-the-box” settings that are so common in every platform. Some of the best gamification is rather simple and unobtrusive. It’s a game element that’s not hitting your members of the head, waving their fingers, and shouting “Hello, here’s this badge I’m going to stick on your profile! Also, here are 1,000 useless points for writing a post! Enjoy!” Gamification without forethought, without consideration for your members’ needs, without heeding the tone and vibe of the community, is doomed to fail.
Talking about internal communities, how relevant is it for employers to build communities now? What’s your advice to the employers out there who don’t know how to start?
How relevant is it for your employees to have an internet connection? I’d say that the need is about equal to that! Employers are dealing with a mass exodus of unhappy, disheartened workers who feel disconnected, ignored, disempowered, and overworked. Internal communities won’t solve all of an employer’s problems, but it can definitely help to convey executive vision, empower work, connect employees across great distances, enable collaboration, and recognize excellence. Most employees expect their company to offer digital experiences comparable to consumer social media platform experiences. That’s table stakes. Internal communities are incredibly powerful tools for making the employee experience better overall.
Employers anxious about how to start can find a wealth of information about digital collaboration and workplaces online. But it may be most helpful to talk to a consultant like me who has helped many organizations start to plan a strategy that can help them set goals, validate needs, choose a platform, and launch a program that will get adoption.
What should the community managers know before jumping from Web2 to Web3? How different is managing a community in Web3 community than Web2?
Being a facilitator and encouraging trust, interactions, and conversations is something that’s not going to change between Web2 and Web3 communities. The community manager should remember that it’s not about technology. It never has been. Community management can succeed or struggle regardless of whether you’re on Facebook, running a Web2 community in Higher Logic, or skimming along in a Web3 Discord community. Understand what your members need by talking with them, then build programs, activities, rewards, and fun that will engage them long term.
The skills required to start a community are different from the skills required to maintain or sustain one. How would you explain the differences?
As someone starting a new community, you’ve got to have a pioneer’s mindset. You’re looking to establish first relationships. You want people to trust you enough to start participating in a brand new space. That requires considerable resilience, because it’s hard to do and it’s slow going until you get enough people into your platform to create critical mass.
Mature communities requiring maintenance and sustainability require someone with a more nuanced skillset: good organizational skills, sensitivity about how messaging might have an impact on trust and interest. A disruptive pioneer mindset that’s prone to try lots of new things can create a sense of uncertainty and chaos in a more established community like this.
I believe that community managers can possess both kinds of skills. It just requires the awareness to know when to deploy them. Do I think that those skills can be learned? Sure, some of them, but each of us brings different strengths to the party.
Your top three advice for someone who’s starting out in community management?
One: You’re not alone. I guarantee that someone else, several someone else’s in fact, have experienced your particular challenge. Ask the question.
Two: It’s going to feel impossible sometimes. Keep going. Communities are built one conversation at a time.
Three: Reinvent yourself regularly. I’ve been at this while and it’s not even my first career. You stay fresh by staying humble, really listening to others, and challenging yourself to try new things. It’s an adventure!
Community builders find it challenging to find and prove their value in the early phase of their existence within an organization, what are some of the ways to build confidence in their work (with or without driving a lot of value at first)?
Communicate regularly with your internal stakeholders. Ask them questions about their goals and relentlessly tie those goals back to the new community. Communicate your actions and results, however small they may be, regularly and often to the stakeholders who gave you their time. Trust is earned through these small steps.
What next for communities? What are some of the trends you’re observing in community management?
This is a huge question! I’ve been tracking fourteen trends in the community space along with related innovations and conditions since the pandemic started. I’ll happily share this document with anyone who is interested. Email me at todd@clocktoweradvisors.com.
*INTERMISSION*
There you have it. Todd is a legend when it comes to building online communities and digital workplaces. You can connect and follow Todd Nilson on LinkedIn.
Feel free to take a break. Stretch, breathe, get some water, etc. Then come back.
There are only a few sections left now: What else we’re reading including a few tweets and news.
You good? Ok! Let’s dive back in 😅
What else we’re reading?
Guide to benchmarking your community. Benchmarking helps establish reasonable goals, identify opportunities, and priorities. Sadly most organizations don’t have anything close to the data they need to build out a decent community strategy. This here is a wonderful breakdown by Richard Millington of Feverbee on why it’s important to get your benchmarking done.
Three Types of Community Benchmarking
1) Benchmarking against competitors. This is where we compare a community against an organization’s competitors.
2) Benchmarking against alternatives. This is where we compare the benefit a community offers an audience against anywhere else a member can get that benefit.
3) Benchmarking against ‘best in class’ standards. This is where we begin with the best standards in each category and benchmark a community against them.
To start a community, create a surround system. Starting anything is hard, and unfortunately, there are no exceptions for communities. We seem to accept that businesses fail all the time, yet when it comes to community we just don't seem to talk about it enough. Rosie Sherry talks about how to get the community off the ground. Read the piece here.
Instead, when starting community, we should focus on deciding what to surround ourselves with.
This is the one strategy that I've used time and time again to kick start a community.
How to choose your online community platform. Here’s a step by step guide by Nivi Achanta on how to choose the community platform.
Your online community platform ≠ your COMMUNITY. Your community exists in a lot of places and your members exist as their full selves. Not just on the internet, and definitely not just in the community you're building. Selecting your platform is important, but not as important as how you build your actual community.
[REPORT] The much-awaited 2022 Community Industry Report by CMX is out. Download your copy now!
The 2022 Community Industry Report is packed with data on:
Community tools and technology
Community industry trends
Salaries
Engagement benchmarks
Health and business value metrics
Team structures and roles
so much more...
[NEWS] Commsor raises a whopping $50m Series B to continue to build for the future of Community-Led. Check out the press release.
Everything we do at Commsor is in pursuit of the Community-Led future: a future where companies move from treating community as an add-on or afterthought and start putting authenticity, relationships, and humanity at the heart of how they do business.
The OG with community advice. When David tweets, everyone listens.
Please train my “neural net” and click the “Like & Comment” button at the bottom!(This is no vanity exercise—the only purpose it serves is to create a feedback loop, so I can make Uncommunity better for you!)
