Theory & strategy for

community building

Deborah Schultz
www.deborahschultz.com

“technology changes, humans don’t”

 Welcome

Introductions
Expectations
Outline of the day
What Community

What does community

mean to you?
An Exercise
What did we learn?

Community Building
Important Concepts
 Collaboration
 Shared ideas, passions and experiences
 Relationship building
 Room for divergent views
 Common language and knowledge,
dialog
 Social structure emerges organically
Key Concepts
 Common, shared purpose
 Interaction - must be easy
 Shared meaning
 Feelings of influence and membership
 Authenticity - Intimacy
 Emergent structures
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
 Case Studies

A critical analyses of
existing communities
Exercise II
Community Types - Broad
 Affiliation
 Circumstance
 Practice
 Elective vs non-elective
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
Choose a Site to “Read”
 Flickr  Threadless
 Ebay  Craigslist
 Quickbooks  Amazon
 Sourceforge  Vox
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
Let’s get strategic

What would you do?

Exercise III
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?
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

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

 Define THE thing  Explore your assets

 Shift your viewpoint  Everyone is an editor
 What really drives  Be human
your audience?  Be an advocate
 Give to get  Feed the beast
 Be bold, be different  Keep it simple
 Be a catalyst  Iterate iterate iterate
 Inspiration & “gut check” reading

Made to Stick Chip & Dan Heath

The Starfish and the Ori Brofman & Rod
Spider 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
 Thanks for participating

Deborah Schultz
www.deborahschultz.com
deborahschultz@gmail.com

Technology changes, humans don’t