Categories: Articles

Conversation Is Not Community

It might seem like an obvious statement, but many brands simply don’t understand this one basic fact: conversation is not community.

Let’s break that down: just because someone is talking about your brand (positively or negatively) it doesn’t mean that they are a part of your community (or that they want to be a part of your community). To push that even further, even if someone has bought from you, loves your product and raves about it everywhere (both online and offline), it still doesn’t mean that they are a part of your community (or that they want to be).

The only way that anybody joins any community is by voluntarily doing so.

It seems like we all need to take a step back, take a deep breathe, and re-read Seth Godin‘s seminal book, Permission Marketing. And, once you’ve inhaled that business book, understand that you can’t even ask for permission any more. You have to earn it and it has to be initiated by the consumer. The backlash to this thought will be something akin to, “what do we do if we have this great community and we want these individuals to join, and they probably would join if they simply knew that we existed?” The answer to this is pretty basic/obvious: do more to get noticed and recognized, so that word spreads and those who may be interested in your community will find you. Yes, make yourself more findable, approachable, likeable and spreadable.

Marketing is going to get harder and harder in 2010.

Marketing is going to get harder because even creating any semblance of a powerful conversation (the stuff that hopefully leads to people joining your community) is going to be ever-more challenging. With conversations happening in so many online channels in so many different forms, getting your signal through the noise is not going to be easy (it’s not easy now). On Twitter today, I tweeted: “Fill in the blank: creating conversations online is…” to which @cguy responded, “like trying to speak at a rock show.”

Anybody can have a conversation.

It’s important to remember that the idea of conversations really happening in the online channel is still a relatively new concept. That being said, many of the platforms we use to connect and share (online social networking) have come to the point where they are so simple to use that everyone (and anyone) is online and having conversations. Whether what they say has any relevance to you is not important. They can create these conversations, they should create these conversations and they are connecting with whomever is important to them. They could be having thousands of conversations all over the place, but still there is no semblance of an active or unified community.

Maybe the idea here is that if you engage in enough meaningful conversations the output of that will hopefully lead to a community?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.