This past week I sat down with David Spinks, CMX Founder and Community Builder Expert for a day and a half of fun brainstorming and learning. Turns out, I had some misconceptions about community.
Community had always been a term I associated with social media and marketing. Communities were built by savvy companies in order to increase customer engagement. They started at the boundary of the company and were directed outward.
Well, here are the four elements that define a community:
- Membership
- Influence (members influence the group and the group influences the members)
- Fulfillment of Needs (members feel the community fills a need for them)
- Shared emotional connection
Communities are built on relationships, not just with the community leader or founder, but among all the members.
Just as companies cannot expect their employees to treat their customers with empathy unless the company treats the employees with empathy, any attempt to build an external community without a strong internal community will assuredly be detected as false and contrived.
However, even more significantly, the four elements of community create a pretty good description of a healthy company culture and one that is necessary for Intent-Based Leadership® to work. We can learn something as leaders building the culture we need in our company from the work of community managers.
To learn more about communities check out cmxhub.com.
