From the Managing Director’s desk:
Am writing to you from Lion City, Singapore. Back “home.”
Hong Kong was an incredibly productive trip, but it also highlighted a few things around what businesses are doing when it comes to “community.”
As a professional Community Manager in the past, I developed a tension but what I knew intuitively was community, versus what the business world was trying to force onto consumers as “community.”
According to the Oxford dictionary, community can mean:
A group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.
Based on these definitions, any group of people with “common characteristics” can be called a community. However, if you dig deeper into sense of community, it goes much deeper than this label.
From my experience, “true” communities don’t just share common interests and attitudes, but go beyond that. They start to tune into one another, volunteer their time (without seeking compensation), and even open up their homes for one another.
This is when you find the difference between an audience and a community. Audiences scale (as you simply look at increasing the number of people). But community, or that sense of community, sinks into the cultural aspect of strong communities. You may be able to replicate an audience (by numbers), but to replicate a community with a strong culture, now that’s a different ball game. That requires conscious effort, behavioural mapping, and time.
The reason why this issue is called “communities don’t scale,” is because when it comes to building trust and confidence in people, which takes time and is an important factor in building resilient communities, that aspect doesn’t scale like technology products. It’s not just a numbers game - the coefficient is not just multiplication, but magnification.
Magnification of trust, deep bonds, and shared values. Some of the harder elements to quantify but, as the saying goes, “not everything that counts can be measured, and not everything that can be measured, counts.”
So if you’re looking to build a truly resilient community, especially in business, don’t just look at your member count. Don’t just look at the transactional elements. Your brand (and pockets) will thank you in the long run.
In today’s online world of bots, cloud server hackings, fake news, and anonymous trolls, follower counts and “likes” are starting to become less and less valuable. Users are becoming savvier, and wary, of inflated numbers.
Twitter has de-emphasised follower count (if you didn’t notice), by switching its position with following counts. Facebook is shifting its algorithm to de-emphasise ads and business posts, to focus more on Groups and personal network posts (to increase intimacy with “true friends”, versus mass followers who may never even engage with you). Deep bonds over loose relationships.
So how do you prepare for all this?Focus on the basics by building trust, deep bonds, and value. Startups may fail fast, but communities build slow.
Speak soon,
George Siosi Samuels
Managing Director, Faiā 🔥
📰 Featured News
🔥Facebook Struggles To Deal with Epic Outage. Did you have trouble with Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp yesterday? So did the rest of the world. Users took to Twitter when they realised what was going on, and it seems like everyone is unsatisfied with the response they gave about what happened.
We, however, used it as an opportunity to catch up on other things. If there was ever a positive from the situation, it was that many users got to catch up on other things that FB/IG/WA typically takes time away from. Isn’t that food for thought?
🔥 Social Media Can Be Improved by Metanet. If you haven’t heard of Metanet before, it’s the brainchild of the notorious Dr. Craig S. Wright, proclaimed creator of Bitcoin and “mastermind” behind the Satoshi group. According to the article, Metanet, which is like the next evolution of the Internet, would improve social media by bringing (true) ownership of data back to the user (via blockchain):
“It is not open platforms people seek but rather closed personal groups and communication with people in a way that allows them to build trust over time. People need to be able to decide what they will consider public, private, or even somewhere in between. Importantly, such a system would include a means to attribute information to a source and stop the widespread misinformation campaigns that have been occurring.”
We would have to agree with the sentiment about “closed personal groups”, as this is echoed by Facebook’s own admission that “connecting the world” was not enough - closer, more intimate communities is what people seek.
🔥 Discord and The Future of Social Networking. If you’re familiar with Slack, then you’ll appreciate Discord. Discord was originally built for gamers (like Slack), and has now gone mainstream. The main difference between Discord and Slack is that Discord really is focused on community. Slack is focused on teams. And ever since Slack decided to double-down on its enterprise customers, I’ve noticed Discord innovate a lot faster with its features. This is one to watch.
💡 Featured Insight
Want to see just how manipulated social media is becoming? Click on the link below. Might make you rethink what you see online when it comes to likes, comments, and follower counts.
With great power comes great responsibility.
🎙 Featured Video
A video on the differences between audiences and communities, from our founder’s archives, and why it matters.
Quote of the Week
“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb
Faiā manages communities around brands. We are a consulting agency, specialising in community management, with a keen interest in emerging technologies that impact social interactions. Our mission is to support the visionaries of the world, so they can build, manage or disrupt communities more wisely.