I am just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human.
—John Trudell
Spoiler Alert: if we want to really understand communities and how to build them, we need to understand people and how they work.
It may sound obvious, but it is astonishing how many people forget this. Businesses get sidetracked about which power tools they need (technology platforms, content, marketing, social media, etc.) and often forget about what they are building, why they are building it, and who it is for.
What’s more, we are all guilty of lulling ourselves into our own vision of who our audience is and what they look like. We assume their character, tone, and interests, and this fiction is often based on little or no information.
One company I worked with had the most boring marketing emails I have ever seen. Dull, formal language replete with stock pictures of desks, chairs, coffee cups with “inspire someone” written on the front, and other such mundane filler.
Their customers were the opposite. Sure, they were executives in financial services, manufacturing, legal, and other areas, but they were fun, vivacious, motivated people. This company calculated that an executive audience needed plain and formal material. They were wrong. We changed it to dynamic, people-centric imagery, and saw improved engagement.
Don’t make the same mistake. We are building human systems, and we need to ensure these systems are founded on a realistic understanding of how humans actually think and behave. You don’t have to be a psychologist or have a degree in social science to accomplish this.
This work is split into three areas:
1. Understand the irrationality of human behavior, why we behave the way we do, and how we can harness key behavioral patterns to our advantage.
2. Decide who our audience is and design a set of audience personas that help us to shape our community around a realistic understanding of their needs and characteristics.
3. Finally, understand the group dynamics in a community so we can engage with our community members as effectively as possible.
Rather conveniently, this is what this chapter is all about. Let’s do it.
THE RATIONALITY OF BEING TOTALLY IRRATIONAL
People are strange creatures. While we live in a physical world, our psychology significantly dictates how we think, how we react, and the choices we make. To put it bluntly: our behavior is often dictated unknowingly by how we process the information we wedge into our brains. What’s more, that processing is often driven by parts of the brain forged hundreds of thousands of years ago to fuel our survival instincts and protect us from the risks surrounding us.
You seem smart. You probably consider yourself a rational, logical person, who evaluates the world around you, makes conscious decisions, and evaluates your progress regularly.
While we do make rational choices, we are also astoundingly irrational. Many of us drink too much alcohol, eat too many fatty foods, don’t exercise enough, don’t save enough for retirement, and make other choices that we know have potentially negative results. We know the risks, but we do these things anyway.
Interestingly, many of us consistently make the same irrational decisions based on the same stimuli.
As an example, there is the Ikea Effect.1 If you and I were to each go and buy a MÖRBYLÅNGA table from Ikea, then go home and put it together, you would think your table is better than mine, and vice versa. Despite the fact that they are exactly the same table model, we consistently overvalue our own creations, and as you can imagine, this can have significant ramifications for communities and companies that have people working together and reviewing each other’s work.
As one example, if we are mindful of the Ikea Effect, we can design peer review in communities to be more objective and avoid the risk of people getting frustrated because other people don’t share their (overstated) feeling of value for their work.
This study of irrationality and how we make decisions is known as behavioral economics. It provides a valuable scaffolding we can use to ensure our communities are based on real, psychological human patterns and behavior. If we understand these principles, we can harness them.
A Tale of Two Brains
This may all seem wildly unintuitive to many of you. Why on earth does this happen?
Daniel Kahneman is an acclaimed psychologist known for his work on judgement and decision making. He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon Smith) and also wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow, one of the seminal books on the topic of behavioral economics.2 In his book, he broadly divides our brain into two areas.
Our System 1 thinking is fast, automatic, and intuitive. It is our immediate, subconscious reaction to the world. This bad boy is thousands of years old, always looking for the tiger lurking in the bush, and assessing the world around us based on raw survival characteristics. This part of our brain makes us flinch when a friend sneaks up on us, makes us nervous when we walk near the edge of a cliff, and makes us scream when we fear danger.
Our System 2 thinking is the slower, analytical, dork cousin of System 1. It is always making a conscious assessment of the world and is fueled by reason and evaluation. It considers the options and makes an evaluation based on its own level of logical thinking.
Here’s the key point. “The idea is that System 1 is really the one that is the more influential; it is guiding System 2, it is steering System 2 to a very large extent,” Kahneman says.3 In other words, our System 1 part of the brain is the impulsive, paranoid survivalist, and our System 2 part of the brain is the responsible, measured decision-maker.
Behavioral Economics Homework
If you are interested in learning more about behavioral economics, the following books are a great start:
• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, rev. and expanded ed. (HarperCollins, 2009).
• Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (HarperCollins, 2010).
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).
• Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin Books, 2009).
The SCARF Model
Behavioral economics provides an enormously valuable blueprint for one of the most challenging elements of building communities and teams: Why do people behave the way they do, and how can we tune our work to map well to those automatic behaviors?
While there are mountains of information about behavioral economics (see the highly recommended reading list above), we want to get going right away. The SCARF model was first published by Dr. David Rock, a neuroscientist, in 2008.4 It provides five key behavioral considerations he identified from his research that are handy for us to be aware of right out the gate:
1. Status is important to us. Our status plays a role when we collaborate, and this affects our mental processes in many ways. We see this everywhere, from our position in our companies, to the pecking order in our social groups and family, position on leaderboards and competitions, and status with airlines.
Be very careful how you harness this. Just like in class-based societies, resentment can form between different status levels. But using status as a means to label and reward enhanced responsibilities (such as moderators, code committers, and governance members) often works well.
How to harness Status in your community strategy:
• Produce different status levels people can earn based upon clear, fair, high-quality participation.
• Reward people based on accomplishing these status levels.
• Put in place safeguards to ensure people don’t increase their status without earning it and that everyone has the opportunity to gain it.
2. Certainty, and more specifically avoiding uncertainty, is important to our well-being. Our brains are effectively pattern-detecting machines that are trying to predict the future. When we have a lack of information, context, or understanding, it makes it more difficult to predict outcomes, and this is when uncertainty, anxiety, and stress set in.
How to harness Certainty in your community strategy:
• Focus on openness and transparency as a tool to avoid uncertainty. This should cover product updates, how the community is led and managed, how problems are solved, and other elements.
• Put in place measures to detect uncertainty so it can be addressed quickly (such as regular meetings and check-ins with active members).
• Provide a simple way in which uncertainty can be rectified (e.g., crisis response measures).
• Ensure your team is trained to be open, transparent, and provide useful information as best they can. This is key: many teams new to communities are reluctant to participate for fear of putting a foot wrong. Solve this with training and mentoring.
3. Autonomy refers to the impact of choices on our lives. Put simply, choice is important to us. No one wants to be boxed in. Research has even found that there is positive correlation between increased choice and health.5
Think carefully about the choices you provide to your community members. Too limited choice is frustrating. Too much choice (typically combined with uncertainty or a lack of confidence in your decisions) can generate decision paralysis. This is particularly important when you present ways in which new members can participate and how they are onboarded. The most successful communities provide many ways to participate but have simple ways of getting started. This provides choice, but with training wheels firmly attached.
How to harness Autonomy in your community strategy:
• Provide multiple ways for people to participate, with clear on-ramps to get started.
• Provide a way for the community to give feedback and optimize how they work together.
• Allow your community to start new initiatives, teams, and projects.
4. Relatedness taps into the natural urge we have to form smaller tribes within a broader group of people. This is likely hardwired from our ancient ancestors living in small communities and being suspicious of strangers (who may be a threat). Not only this, but smaller groups often create a better opportunity for people to find a sense of belonging and “home.”
Breaking communities into smaller teams can be a powerful way to tap into this safety instinct and build a sense of team spirit, identity, and belonging. As an example, your community may have a developer team, a support team, and an advocacy team. These naturally map to audience personas (which we will create later in this chapter), and people could join more than one team if they prefer.
This can simplify onboarding (it is easier to join a small team than a much bigger group). Be careful, though, to keep the number of teams small and the communication channels between them open to avoid silos.
How to harness Relatedness in your community strategy:
• Create a number of community teams. Start small with just a few teams mapped to personas (covered later) and grow as more people join the community.
• Mentor these teams in developing their own culture, team spirit, mascots, and more. This builds safety and belonging.
• Ensure that these teams are regularly communicating effectively with each other.
5. Fairness is important, not just because we want to be treated fairly ourselves but because unfair treatment elicits both a threat response, and—in some cases—a disgust response. Fairness should be a core value in communities that you build.
Seeing, providing, and experiencing fairness triggers a reward mechanism in us psychologically. It builds confidence and safety. This is a powerful principle we can harness. If we design a community that provides many opportunities for the fair exchange of value (e.g., solving problems, producing content, creating technology), it elicits an intrinsic reward response.
How to harness Fairness in your community strategy:
• Document clear expectations about conduct and participation.
• Provide training and ensure your leaders and staff follow these expectations and treat the community fairly.
• Provide clear ways in which community members can report unfair treatment and bias and have it judged objectively.
Let’s take a breather for a moment. We have looked at the fundamental drivers behind why people want to join and thrive in teams and communities plus the hidden forces that influence our behavior. Now we need to get practical and start figuring out who your target audiences are and how you can design your community for them.
GETTING TO KNOW YOU (WITH AUDIENCE PERSONAS)
An audience persona is a sketch of a typical community member. They are designed to identify common characteristics and attributes with different categories of audience members.
The concept of audience personas has been around forever in marketing circles. Personas are valuable, but some marketers tend to overegg the pudding a little. Frankly, I have seen ridiculous examples of audience personas so unnecessarily detailed and dense that they seem to be primarily intended for showing off. Personas need to get your team and organization aligned about who your audiences are. They are not designed to predict what kind of milk your audience puts on their cornflakes.
This defeats the whole point of producing personas. Just like our Big Rocks, audience personas are supposed to provide clarity to you, your team, and other members of your organization—in this case about what to expect in a typical audience member. Audience personas are supposed to trigger conversations about which types of audience are your priority, how you find them, and how you can delight them.
You can produce these personas by following three steps:
Step 1: Choose Target Personas
Unlike marketing personas, which often look more like a résumé of a user or customer, community personas take a slightly different approach.
Communities are fundamentally driven by active participation. This participation can be as simple as consuming information and joining discussions on a forum or as advanced as producing code that is integrated into a shared software project. The ways in which we find, motivate, reward, and engage people in a forum, and the ways in which we find, motivate, reward and engage people who write code is entirely different.
Audience personas help us to codify an understanding of what these different types of participation look like. How will they participate? What kinds of rewards do they enjoy? What motivates them? What are they worried about? Where do they consume information (so we know how to find them)?
To give this some color, let’s take a spin through some of the most common personas in communities. This is by no means an exhaustive list and there may be additional personas you can think of that apply to you.
As you read these, think about which two to five of these personas you would like in your community.
1. Users are the general consumers in your community. They use your service, product, or technology. Their priority is using the product effectively and adding value in their lives. We want them to stay up to date with product news, be able to provide feedback to us, and ensure they remain loyal and happy users/customers.
2. Fans go the extra mile. They want to meet other fans, have discussions, and debate various topics. They provide feedback and guidance about your product and community. They often provide support too. We want our fans to be happy, motivated, and excited about our community. We want to ensure we build relationships with them (as they thrive on this validation) and always keep them excited with new features, initiatives, and ways of engaging.
3. Support people help other users solve problems. This may be as simple as solving individual problems for individual people, or more involved such as personal mentoring, or even providing training for multiple people. We want these people to always grow their skills (to provide broader support), deliver high-quality support, and always feel satisfied and validated by the people they help.
4. Content Creators produce content and material. This could be documentation and guidance about your product, blog posts with training/guidance, tutorial videos, podcasts, material for helping onboard new community members, or anything else.
Content is powerful not just for amping up the amount of material but for generating authentic material. While it may lack the spit and polish your marketing team buffs into their content, community content carries independent authenticity. Also, it doesn’t hurt that a lot of content creators are secret advocates who love to promote their work (and thus your community). We want to ensure that they are producing material that is high quality, consumed by others, that their work has a high impact, and that it is available to as many people as possible.
5. Advocates want your product and community to be successful. They perform marketing, outreach, and promotion to raise awareness and get people interested and involved. They are often big personalities with some familiarity with marketing and promotion. We want to ensure they have the flexibility, support, and permission to do great work (without holding them back for fear of going “off message”).
6. Event Organizers enjoy producing and delivering events. This can include meetups, conferences, unconferences, and more. We want to ensure these people are motivated, are organizing events that are well attended, and have the resources they need to do great work.
7. Inner Developers write code and perform engineering that benefits a shared project in the community (such as an open-source project). We want them to enjoy solving interesting technical problems and have their contributions appreciated by the community and company.
8. Outer Developers build applications and services that run on a platform we run. These people usually have another primary motive (e.g., they run a business or want to make money). We want them to produce software that adds value to our platform and accomplishes their goals (e.g., growth of their application, making money).
Of course, there are many more potential audience personas, and you can find more examples by heading to https://www.jonobacon.com and selecting Resources. Decide what contributions you are most interested in seeing and pick your two to five audience personas that reflect this. Now, let’s prioritize them.
Step 2: Prioritize Your Personas
Pretty much every client I work with wants to build communities that attract all the audience personas that we just ran through. Why wouldn’t they? They want to kick ass on all fronts.
Time for a reality check. You can do this if you want, but you will be a jack of all trades and a master of none. As with most things in life, you should focus on quality over quantity. Each persona requires a lot of work—each needs its own strategy, onboarding, content plan, engagement, incentives map—which we will discuss throughout the rest of this book. It is difficult to do this well for all personas (even if you throw a huge team at it, it runs the risk of being suboptimal).
You should also think about the popularity of these personas. Some personas are going to have more participants than others. For example, you are likely to have far more consumers of content than creators of content. You will have different proportions of support people than translators. Some (but not all) of these roles will also overlap, such as support people also being advocates.
It is difficult to get a sense of these proportions before you start. Take a look at similar communities and assess what proportion of members are in their target personas. Combine this with any data you may have to estimate these numbers (e.g., how much interest you may have already seen in a community) and a realistic gut check.
Taking all of this into account, you need to prioritize.
Grab your Community Mission Statement and your Community Value Statement. Based on the value you want to drive, which of the personas that you chose are most critical for the next year? Choose two, or three max.
No, you can’t have four. Prioritization is about making tough choices. Some personas need to get cut from our focus in this coming year. Choose your two or three personas (we can revisit other personas for the following year).
For example, below could be a priority list of personas for a Champion community (in priority order):
1. Fans: Our top priorities are getting people passionate about our community, keeping them interested, and helping them stay engaged.
2. Support: We want our fans to provide high-quality guidance and advice to our users. This will be primarily focused on answering questions on a forum.
3. Content Creators: We want to build a range of high-quality documentation and guides and some tutorial videos. This will nicely augment the support provided on the forum.
Step 3: Create Your Personas
For each of your targeted personas, flesh them out. Create a document for each and, as usual, keep this simple, focused, and concise. This should be one to three pages max for each persona.
Now start filling out some key elements of each persona:
Capabilities. What capabilities do you expect this persona to have? For example, for Content Creators you should expect some prior writing, video, or audio production experience, and Developers should have programming experience. Get specific. What kind of writing experience and which programming languages and frameworks do you want for these respective personas? Be realistic: What is reasonable to expect from most people?
Experience. What experience do you expect your personas to have? This experience can be a mixture of formal (e.g., career, qualifications, etc.) or vocational (e.g., other projects, events, and experience). I recommend you primarily focus on vocational experience (e.g., which products and communities do they have experience with?) to ensure your audience is as pragmatically experienced as possible.
Motivations. What motivates this persona? What outcomes would get this person excited to participate? How do they like to see their work acknowledged? For example, Content Creators love to see their contributions published, Event Organizers love to have well-known speakers at their events and interesting (and generous) sponsors. Produce a list of these motivations.
Fears. Now flip the coin. What are the fears for each persona? What are the things they would worry about that we can try to prevent? For example, Event Organizers worry that no one will show up to their event. Developers worry about submitting broken code. These fears are important to know so we can put measures in place to avoid them.
Rewards. Now list rewards that would be interesting. For example, Content Creators who write articles love to see their work printed and framed, and Support people love to see their guidance featured on blog posts and articles. Most personas love T-shirts, mugs, and other swag. As we will discuss later, think carefully here about the logistics of shipping rewards. For example, T-shirts can be a pain as you need to have different cuts and sizes in stock.
Where They Live. Now, let’s not get creepy here, I don’t mean their physical address, but where do they spend their time? What websites do they visit? Which podcasts do they listen to? Which shows do they watch? Which conferences do they attend? Which social media accounts do they follow? This is especially important: it will help us find and bring our target personas to our community.
To create the most useful, accurate, and effective personas, try to depend on as much data and help from other people as you can:
• What kind of people do you see in your analytics for your website, who follows you on social media, and what do your customers like?
• Look at other communities similar to the one you want to build. Look at their different personas, how people participate, and their attributes.
• Interview members of your target persona and ask them directly what they would like to see in each persona.
• Share your personas with your colleagues, friends, and industry associates and get their feedback.
• Look at industry trends for norms. For example, find the most popular websites in your industry and identify what kind of personas populate them.
OK, let’s now spin through a few simple examples to put some meat on the bone.
Example 1: Support Persona
This is Riya and she enjoys solving problems in the Acme Platform community (you guessed right; this is a fake example).
CAPABILITIES
• Deep knowledge of the product
• Experience of the product in a variety of scenarios and configurations
• Effective problem-solver. Has experience solving other people’s problems
• Good communicator and able to provide guidance easily in written form
EXPERIENCE
• Familiar with online and community support
• Product experience will be variable, but fairly experienced in using it to solve practical problems (not a newbie)
• Some limited experience in online communities
MOTIVATIONS
• Product discounts
• Exclusive access to early features or unique material, content, or experiences
• Helping people
• Recognition in the community
• Broader awareness of her business
FEARS
• Providing inaccurate information
• Providing answers that may cause problems or break something
• Imposter syndrome (fear that you may not be as talented as other people think you are)
REWARDS
• Swag
• Financial (e.g., gift cards)
• Recognition and validation of her contributions
Example 2: Event Organizer Persona
This is Miguel and he enjoys coordinating events, conferences, and meetups for the Acme Platform community.
CAPABILITIES
• Coordinating and running events
• Putting together content, speakers, and other material for an event
• Working with venue, food/beverage, and other vendors
• Handling and working with sponsors and sponsorship funds
EXPERIENCE
• Has run a number of small local meetups
• Was a volunteer for a local conference
MOTIVATIONS
• Loves to bring people together
• Enjoys face-to-face engagement and in-person discussion
• Enjoys working with knowledgeable and notable speakers and sponsors
• Enjoys being in the limelight when running the event
FEARS
• That no one will show up
• That speakers are not interested in speaking at his events
• That he embarrasses himself and the community with a poorly run event
• That an event loses money (not covering costs)
REWARDS
• Acknowledgement of running great events
• Building his career experience and expertise
• Appreciation at the end of an event for putting it together
• Awards and recognition
Examples
Understanding and delivering personas is always easier to do with templates and examples. As such, I have produced a collection of personas that you can find by heading to https://www.jonobacon.com and selecting Resources.
THE TEN GOLDEN RULES FOR ENGAGING WITH MEMBERS
This chapter is called “Humans Are Weird,” but communities are weird too. One of the biggest fears my clients usually have is that they are going to break some bizarre unwritten rule in how communities work.
While there are a raft of group dynamics you will pick up as you build your community experience, here are ten consistent golden rules that map to every community I have ever worked with:
1. Your community members work for the community, not for you. Your community is motivated by (a) their own self-interest, and (b) supporting the broader success of the community. With rare exceptions (such as internal corporate communities), this motivation is primarily directed toward serving the community, not your business.
This often trips up companies who argue, “Well, if the business succeeds, the community will benefit.” Good point, but it doesn’t matter. This is not how most community members think and not how the social economy works. Focus your efforts on adding pragmatic value to the community, and your business is likely to benefit indirectly.
2. If you ask them to help, they often will. A lot of people ask me how they get their community involved in specific projects. The answer is simple: ask them. General calls for volunteers to provide help often demonstrate limited results, but reaching out to specific individuals to ask them to do specific things often works well. Importantly though, the members are only likely to help if the work is (a) interesting to them, and (b) benefits the broader community.
3. They thrive on personal validation and gratification. Community members love quick, gratifying results (such as solving problems, producing content that is appreciated, running events, etc.). Similarly, they thrive on recognition of good work, particularly if it is from recognized leaders in the community (such as CEOs, community leaders, and well-respected individual contributors).
4. They are not free labor for your company. A common blunder many companies make is assuming this raft of community members will be interested in doing work that benefits the company such as sales, supporting customers, producing testimonials, etc. Members are unlikely to do work that benefits only your company and not the broader community. Some may even feel insulted that you asked them to provide free labor in the first place. To avoid this, ensure your personas always focus on work that mutually benefits your members and the community, not just the business.
5. They are not sales leads. This is important. Don’t let your sales team get their grubby hands on your community members. If people join the community, add value, and you reward them with unwanted sales emails, cold calls, and spam, you will irritate them (and they will likely complain about this publicly). Solve this by providing incentives for community members to come to you for sales, not the other way.
6. They don’t have the same information and context as you do. When you work for a company that is a primary participant and investor in a community, you always have way more information than your community does. You know your staff, your customers, their motivations, the commercial dynamics and drivers, the broader corporate goals, and more.
Your community lacks this context, and as is normal with people, when information is missing, they sometimes make it up. This can result in tension (because of the uncertainty we covered earlier in the SCARF model) that can erode trust. The antidote to this is transparency, openness, and clarity. Where possible, overcommunicate features, products, policy changes, and more with the community (in an interactive way).
7. They may share the same vision, but not the same approach. Communities are a melting pot of priorities. Many members of your community will share your vision, but they may not share the same way of accomplishing it.
For example, when I was at Canonical, the company wanted a high-quality, successful desktop platform. This manifested in a product that we built called Unity, but some community members felt Unity was the wrong approach (due to various reasons such as the design, implementation, and other things I won’t bore you with). We sought to rectify this with active engagement and discussion.
Bring clarity on the vision, but be prepared that your approach may also need some discussion. You don’t need to seek permission from your community (you can channel your businesses resources however you like), but you do want to get their support and buy-in.
8. Their commitment and organizational experience will vary. Some community members can spend every waking moment participating in a community and some will show up for an hour here and there.
Some will want to pop in, do something, and get out. Some will be more involved in planning and structure. Provide opportunities for people to play roles with varying degrees of commitment, and don’t assume everyone has the same time commitment and organizational appetite as you and your team.
9. The quieter ones are often your secret weapons. While there will be an abundance of vivacious personalities in your community, some members will be quieter and more reserved. It can be tempting to assume that only the louder personalities are bringing their A-game, but in many cases the quieter, less-vocal people will produce incredible value.
The key here is to engage them one-on-one. The quieter ones are often uncomfortable speaking up, so connect to them privately, get their feedback, support their success, and develop their confidence.
10. They are your friends, and friends keep friends honest. If your community is happy, they will celebrate your work, and if they are unhappy, they will be critical. This can sometimes tie companies new to communities up in knots.
Don’t see criticism as attacks; see it as shining a light on problems that may need resolving. Constructive criticism shows members care and is a sign of the success of your community. Good community members will keep you focused on the problems, even if they express it rather bluntly. Require civility, not agreement to everything you do.
STRAIGHTENING OUT THE CHAOS
People don’t like to be put into boxes. Sure, the world has designed different-shaped and different-sized hamster wheels for us to spin in, but many of them are ultimately unfulfilling.
Companies historically were command-and-control environments; the people at the top handed down decisions to the worker bees who followed them dutifully. This is a model that is eroding more every day. Successful modern businesses are instead seeking to strike the right balance of leadership and autonomy—it maps much more intuitively to our instinctual human drivers and psychology.
This is why communities present such an opportunity. They are a fishbowl where you can design on-ramps, workflow, incentives, and engagement that are influenced by our psychological needs and get rapid-fire feedback from your members on how well they work.
Communities need to be malleable in nature; they should evolve and change based on the trends and feedback you see in your members. This provides a fantastic environment to experiment and explore how to build the right balance between leadership and autonomy.
The lessons you learn don’t just improve your community. They can also improve your business, member organizations, families, and more.