Theory and strategy for community building

1. Theory & strategy for
community building
Deborah Schultz
www.deborahschultz.com
“technology changes, humans
don’t”

2. Welcome
Introductions
Expectations
Outline of the day

3. An Exercise
What Community
What does community
mean to you?

4. What did we learn?
Community Building

5. Important Concepts
 Collaboration
 Shared ideas, passions and
experiences
 Relationship building
 Room for divergent views
 Common language and knowledge,
dialog
 Social structure emerges

6. Key Concepts
 Common, shared purpose
 Interaction - must be easy
 Shared meaning
 Feelings of influence and
membership
 Authenticity - Intimacy
 Emergent structures

7. The birth of a community
 We just illustrated that:
 Tacit and explicit theories drive our
community strategy
 Norming functions develop quickly
 There is an individual and group
collective
 Clustering is a natural evolution of
community

8. Case Studies
A critical analyses of
existing communities
Exercise II

9. Community Types - Broad
 Affiliation
 Circumstance
 Practice
 Elective vs non-elective

10. Three questions
 Review the community list we
created what do you think is the
intention of this site?
 Why do you think these examples
are successful at community
 How do they measure their success

11. Choose a Site to “Read”
 Flickr
 Ebay
 Quickbooks
 Sourceforge
 Threadless
 Craigslist
 Amazon
 Vox

12. Lessons learned
 Community needs vary by type
 Affiliation
 Circumstance
 Practice
 Elective vs non-elective
 Elective affinity means we cannot
mandate community
 Create platforms of emergent
community

13. Let’s get strategic
What would you do?
Exercise III

14. Answer these questions
 Who - are you designing for?
 What are you going to give them?
 How are you going to tell them?
 How would you measure success?

15. Three important rules
 Culture is based on your theories
 Strategy varies greatly for elective
vs non-elective communities
 A huge attitude shift is needed
You are now a partner and catalyst

16. Elements of Community
 Content Curation
 User Refined
Search
 Create &
consume
 The Live Web
 Value is rewarded
 Co-creation
 Shared experience
 Offline & online
 Participation
 Niche vs Mass
 Authenticity
This is not about technology

17. Things to Think About
 Define THE thing
 Shift your viewpoint
 What really drives
your audience?
 Give to get
 Be bold, be
different
 Be a catalyst
 Explore your assets
 Everyone is an
editor
 Be human
 Be an advocate
 Feed the beast
 Keep it simple
 Iterate iterate iterate

18. Made to Stick Chip & Dan Heath
The Starfish and the
Spider
Ori Brofman & Rod
Beckstrom
The Wisdom of Crowds James Suriowiecki
Citizen Marketers Jackie Huba/Ben
McConell
Seth Godin Pick one
Cluetrain Manifesto Doc Searls, David
Weinberger, Chris Locke
Inspiration & “gut check” reading

19. Thanks for participating
Deborah Schultz
www.deborahschultz.com
deborahschultz@gmail.com
Technology changes, humans don’t