Suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine that community has indeed become the global marketplace.
That your early enthusiast supporters, your networks from university, your church groups, your bicycle buddies that you ride with on Saturday mornings are all atomic connections weaving in and out of interest groups and communities.
That as you make your way through life you are already touching the markets you want to aggregate at zero degrees of separation. That connecting people for selling products, populating events, raising money to support a cause are all within your grasp.
If you wanted to aggregate these communities today, where would you start?
We know the work we need to do to discover the right dynamics that bind people together.
How we work to position ourselves. How we empower people so that they feel ownership of what we do as their own. How to communicate in a language that leaves room for personalization.
We can figure out how to broaden what we do to extend our appeal and use community as a market tool.
As an example, I looked at Little Bits site yesterday and wondered why I liked it so much yet felt no impetus to buy it for the kids in my family. Why they were positioning it as an educational toy rather than a way to spark a new generation, part of a larger community of makers beyond the home and school room? It’s a choice.
The thing that I can’t get my head around though is why there are no platforms to build community on.
When I asked this questions of my Twitter and Facebook networks I got a very healthy response but almost no examples. Nothing beyond the memory of what happened to Ning.
Here’s the thing.
Community happens regardless.
In today’s world it happens around things, not really on them. Communities as my buddy Kevin Marshall pointed out are developing around Slack. Connections breed socialization and socialization surfaces common ground cross people and groups.
They form in and around Facebook in massive numbers. Populations have grouped themselves, formed in network and in real life even though the tools and infrastructure within Facebook itself are wildly primitive and prohibitive to community use.
A few years ago I wrote a popular post around the idea that You can’t airlift communities. Communities form naturally around moments of engagement wherever it may be. This happens frequently on Facebook when bloggers post a link, the conversations forms there and they are hapless to move it to their blogs.
I’m torn a bit here and wondering whether this idea of a community platform is a next huge opportunity or by structure, not possible at all.
I believe completely that community is an atomic connection not a series of vertical niches.
See my post on Community as the marketplace where I discussed how platforms like Kickstarter are not communities themselves but the end point of many which gather around an idea or a passion with a connected transaction. They are the marketing and transactional platform, the community is cross the web itself.
If this is true, can you platform it?
Is the very nature of it being atomic make this counterintuitive? Is the fact that we don’t belong to one but many communities make the idea of one that is atomic impossible by nature?
Or can you rethink simple tools and templates?
Can you dust off what Shopify has done for transactions and build an infrastructure that let’s us have some templates for common activities that occur within all community structures.
People want to do certain things so why not create tools to make it easier? And smart structures to let these be less hard wired, more flexible yet with a common purpose.
Can there be a community api even?
This idea woke me up.
It’s huge one and tied to how we could be rethinking the very definition of marketing itself.
Imagining a world that capitalizes on the things Facebook doesn’t do well that our behaviors demand is easy to get excited about. Community may be one of those.
It’s one thing for us as individuals unhindered to search around and bump into micro communities that we can support. From animal rescues to communities of programmers we need to hire from or, in today’s world, to debate some of the serious whacky scares that are touching our lives.
But for our companies, be they startups or established orgs like your library, your church, your reading and fitness groups—this is a need that is to big to ignore.
I’m going to leave this open.
I know that today, community happens wherever it can. I know that as a behavioral structure it is indeed the core of our marketplace cross all the things we do, believe in and purchase.
But when I look at the role of marketing and the opportunities to give these tools to a larger slice of people and brands to manage their communities, this is just to important an idea not to think through.
Someone must be tackling this.
It’s a game changer if done right.
