Sometimes there are cultural shifts that we experience long before we become aware of their impact on how we live and work.
We wake up and realize that we are using old world tools and ideas for a vastly different new world order.
This is happening today where the idea of community meets the reality of the marketplace.
In the 90s, Geoffrey Moore nailed community and the power of interest groups as the power play of an early-wired world
His idea that you can leverage an early adopter interest group as a sling shot leap into the mass market was brilliant.
Geoff’s vision of the chasm, and Seth Godin’s idea of tribes on hilltops pounding on drums to send signals were connected.
Seth’s idea came later and went further but both defined an Alice’s Restaurant sort of market spread for both the building of brands and the anchoring of commerce around it.
The web as the amplifier and aggregator of groups with connecting individuals as their market momentum was the big aha.
That was then though and this is now.
There is a reason that marketing has fallen into such disrepair and lack of respect.
We’ve focused on approximation and virtual scales of sentiment rather than the tangible and powerful result of social grouping—community–and how that drives change in the markets that form naturally around it.
We’ve ignored the key change in how community functions in a world that is both different in how we navigate it and different in the core of our behaviors.
Today, there are no more chasms.
There are no more hilltops. No individual nodes and no gated communities.
There are only atomic connections that move horizontally across the threads of the world on social nets and in mobile communities.
The more you look to focus them narrowly the more you will miss the thread.
This dawned on me a few years ago that the communities on Kickstarter where not on their site but everywhere cross the web.
Somehow the emotional clarity of a creative project spread out across the nets and tied together people in a loose chain of support aggregated in the transaction.
The project was not the community, the emotional clarity of the idea was the connector.
Community was not a layer nor an entity nor exclusive.
Brand, while born out of belief, was less an idea and more of an emotion.
And marketing needed to be redefined as a language that connects what we believe in naturally to a market that supports it.
I don’t know what the operational manual for a world where community is the definition of a market is going to look like.
We are in many ways living it before we understand it.
What I do know is that we are different today as people then we were. The markets are different along with us.
If you are an entrepreneur, I can guarantee that your company is already firmly in a community and in market from day one.
You need to start right there.
If you think your community is simply the enthusiasts that you’ve gathered you are thinking too narrowly. That was the reality in the 90s.
You are missing community in a networked world as inclusive and expansive by definition, horizontal from the beliefs that make it real.
You need to discard the idea that there is a place where community ends and market begins. That you need to approximate and measure community in order to leverage it to a market.
You can’t imagine your market into place certainly.
I’m going to get asked: Is there a new list of tactics we need to implement?
The wrong question to ask first.
You need to step back.
You need to imagine when Kickstarter realized that by the simple act of empowering people to support things that inspired them, they had touched a primal need whose community was as broad as the world.
When Airbnb or Sound Cloud realized that at their most elemental value they touched a community of common interests that opened a market that was as big as the global market itself.
Take a huge whiteboard.
Gather your team and your advisors around you. Fill the entire thing then wipe it clean.
Find the one phrase. Isolate the one emotion, the one core truth that makes you special and unstoppable.
Makes you essential to the market size you imagine.
Understand that community as marketplace is both the message and the medium in today’s world.
Companies succeed on execution but not without that core.
Start there.
