What is an online community and is it right for your organization?
“Online community” is one of those terms that’s a little tough to get a handle on. Like “social media” it’s pretty vague.
In a lot of cases, I run into leaders or business owners who jump to the conclusion that online communities are the same thing as the big social media platforms.
“Oh, you mean like Facebook?” they ask.
It’s an innocent enough question but I’d argue that online communities are something quite different.
In this article, I’m going to share what online communities are (and what they are not). I hope that by the end you’ll have an idea about why and how they’re useful. Maybe you’ll even have a better idea about whether or not your organization even needs one.
What is an online community?
An online community is a group of people who share an interest, a need, a value, or belief, and who choose to meet at last part of the time online.
Learn about the types of online communities
More often than not, these people share several somethings in common, and that shared something is deep and persistent enough that they choose to return to the online community frequently.
Notice that I said that these people meet at least part of the time online.
Online communities frequently combine some element of in-person get togethers with online connection. Some online communities are entirely virtual. Some begin as a face-to-face group of people and continue to meet face-to-face over time.
It’s my personal belief that communities combining both in person and online meeting places are the more powerful and sustainable.
The precise nature of the online community can vary quite a lot. At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got chat-style applications like Discord, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. At the other end, you’ve got some heavy duty enterprise-grade community platforms like Higher Logic, Telligent, Khoros, and Salesforce Community Cloud (now known as Experience Cloud) that leverage customer grade experiences of the big social media platforms. Somewhere in the middle, you’ve got discussion forums, which have always been an effective, powerful way to convene conversations.
But a community might even exist as the comments section in a secret Google Doc where students talk about their classmates, teachers, assignments, and more.
Truly heavy-duty community platforms, the ones designed for enterprise users, can be heavily integrated with other kinds of corporate systems ranging from document management, collaboration, and time entry to learning management, benefits, and complex manufacturing and inventory applications.
Or they might just consist of a “threaded” discussion forum like Vanilla (a partner of Clocktower Advisors)
Adoption is the Challenge for Building an Online Community
Communities mediated by text-based technology are hard. For anyone who has ever tried to start up a Slack group and get others to actually use it, you realize that it requires people who are more or less comfortable expressing themselves in text.
Doing so is quintessentially weird for many people.
That’s why many online communities include instructions about how to write a great post.
Posting for the first time in an online community requires a degree of outgoingness, a willingness to trust that others in this same online space mean well and that you aren’t going to be embarrassed or otherwise called out for missed punctuation, a factual error, or a bad opinion.
It requires a willingness to trust that the owner of the platform is a basically ethical person or company that does not intend to cheat, monetize, or otherwise manipulate you.
That’s saying something today, and can cut out a whole grouping of social media based community groups (Facebook, LinkedIn) that have demonstrated the opposite of ethical behavior in multiple cases.
Read seven ways to create safe spaces in online communities
How are online communities different from Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook?
I’m going to split hairs here a bit but it’s for a good reason.
Online communities can indeed exist inside of a major social media platform like Facebook or LinkedIn, but I’m going to argue that online communities are distinct from big social media despite the fact that both enable the users of a technology to post original content, comment, like, and share.
Online communities, however, are about boundaries. Social media platforms by themselves are not bounded by anything, not by geography, not by common interest, not by demographics. They are purpose built for everyone to be the party that never ends.
I’ll pause here for you to take a breath acknowledging just how exhausting that can be.
What distinguishes an online community from a social media platform is that in an online community, you’re only going to find people swarming around a topic of common interest. While you might see this topic show up from time to time on your Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn feed, it’s going to be a fleeting one.
Online communities tend to stay (mostly) on topic and they tend to go deep whereas social media posts are more like the the catch of the day, best consumed today and long gone off by tomorrow.
So while online communities have more to do with social media platforms, they’re walled off from the madding crowd and tend to get really nerdy about whatever topic that community happens to be about. And that’s a good thing.
Internal and external communities
Broadly speaking, all online communities fall into one of two categories.
They are either world-facing or external types of communities for hobbyists, enthusiasts, fans, prospects or customers, or they are internally-facing digital workplaces for employees (and perhaps their partners who are welcomed inside on a limited basis).
External communities are more open and transparent, but they are more precarious and scary for companies to run. Leaders often fret about what members of an online community will say about the company or product and therefore never feel confident to get one started.
However, those companies that do choose to invest in a branded external community usually do so in order to engender greater customer loyalty. Some also find a benefit to external communities in that they can become a place to hear about new uses for existing products or to learn about ideas for entirely new ones.
Internal communities, or digital workplaces, are a more common starting place for companies but they need to be private, secure, and usually need to have a really good API library or built-in integrations to make them useful for employees. Companies will start up internal communities and digital workplaces as a replacement for their dinosaur-old, static intranet sites that nobody has bothered to update since 2005 or before.
Digital workplaces get started as a means of empowering employees to work better together. The selling points for internal communities tend to be easier.
Many leaders perceive the potential benefits of connecting their employees virtually, especially since the COVID-19, but even before the current pandemic when they easily grasped that greater employee efficiency could be the result.
Internal communities can deliver on much more, though. In addition to improving productivity, they can help employees to feel more connected and to establish deeper working relationships with co-workers, having a direct impact on retention.
Internal communities can also help improve morale and can serve leaders as a vehicle for better expressing a company vision and culture to employees.
Finally, internal communities can serve as a source for new product or service ideas and as a way to groom and mentor future leaders in the company.
Is an online community right for my organization?
The decision to build an online community shouldn’t ever be made lightly and it isn’t always the right move for every organization.
Beyond the obvious expense that can be incurred for the technology platform itself, the time to value can only best be described as a long term investment.
Online communities can take upwards of nine months or longer to reach a state of member participation to make it worthwhile.
You’ll also need one or more dedicated community managers depending upon the size of the community you’ll be launching. Ideally, any community manager you hire for your community should have some idea or affinity for the topic as well as experience starting up a brand new community from scratch.
If your organization’s leadership does not understand the investment, ignores or glosses over the amount of time it can take to recoup it, and does not have a plan for measuring success, it’s probably something you shouldn’t undertake.
If, however, your leadership team understands and embraces the potential benefits from a community, it can become the most enriching element of your overall digital marketing strategy, contributing directly to the fulfillment of business goals for the organization.
Are you ready to get started with online community?
If you or your organization would like to learn more about how to build an online community that is sustainable and thriving, I encourage you to schedule a short exploratory conversation. At minimum, I will be happy to share with you pitfalls to avoid, examples, and some metrics and frameworks to help you get started thinking about what’s involved.
Clocktower Advisors regularly presents introductory virtual seminars on leading community practices and can advise you about platform technologies, operational leading practices, and a growing list of trusted solution partners that may be right for your organization.
