People Powered

How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams

Jono Bacon

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781400214891
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

What if you discovered a blueprint that could grow your brand’s reputation and loyalty, dramatically reduce customer service issues, produce content and technology, and cement a powerful, lasting relationship between you and your customers?

Communities have been a popular topic since the rise of the Internet and social media, but few companies have consistently harnessed their power, driven tangible value, and effectively measured their return on investment (ROI) like Salesforce.com, Star Citizen via Kickstarter, and Red Hat. Companies such as PayPal, Facebook, Bosch, Microsoft, CapitalOne, and Google, have also built communities inside their organizations, which have fostered innovation, broken down silos, and helped their organizations to operate more efficiently and collaboratively.

People Powered helps C-suite leaders, founders, marketers, customer advocates, and community leaders gain a competitive advantage by answering the following questions: 

• What is the key value proposition of building a community?
• What kind of community do we need and how do we build and integrate it into our organization?
• How do we incentivize and encourage people to get involved, build reliable growth, and keep community members engaged?
• How do we develop authentic, productive relationships with community members both online and in person?
• How do we get departmental buy-in, hire effectively, and create consistent, reliable community engagement skills in our organization?
• What are the strategic and tactical pitfalls and roadblocks we need to avoid?
• How do we make sure that our community continues to grow with us—and more importantly, how do we make sure that we continue to grow with them?

People Powered pulls together over 20 years of pragmatic experience into a clear, simple methodology and blueprint to not just answer these questions, but deliver results.

Don’t get left behind—become an industry trailblazer and ensure your company’s longevity by tapping into the most dynamic force both outside and inside your organization: the people.

CHAPTER 1

What Is a Community and Why Do You Need to Build One?

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

—African proverb

In 2006, at the tender age of twenty-six, I started a new job at a British company called Canonical. Founded by newly minted South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, the company was focused on building a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows operating system monopoly. The twist was that this new operating system, Ubuntu, was created by a globally connected network of volunteers who freely shared the open-source code. My role was to turn a small set of contributors into an international movement.

Less than a year into my new gig I got an enthusiastic email from a kid called Abayomi. Little did I realize this message would have a transformative impact not just on my career but on the rest of my life.

Abayomi lived in a rural village in Africa. Like many young people, his email was disjointed, yet sweet. He talked about how he discovered Ubuntu, how he tried to explain it to his parents, and how he struggled to participate in the community due to not having a computer at home. His family lived a frugal life, but his interest in technology was something his parents wanted to support, despite their limited means.

He told me how he would perform chores around his village all week to earn as much money as he could. He would then walk two hours to his local town and use the money he earned to buy time at an Internet cafe to participate in the Ubuntu community.

This Internet time was usually short, often less than an hour. He would answer questions from users, write documentation and help guides, translate Ubuntu into his local language, and more. Then he would walk the two hours back home. He didn’t complain; he didn’t whine. Quite the opposite—he gushed with enthusiasm about how he felt energized that he, a kid in rural Africa, could play a role in a global project making a real difference. I was stunned at not just his commitment but his humility.

Back then, in 2007 in England, Abayomi’s email was yet another example of a rebellion against what I was seeing where I lived. People often complained about their communities withering and dying. It was the same scripture churned out each time: “People don’t know their neighbors anymore,” and “People spend all their time buried in movies, video games, and the Internet.” Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Yet here I saw people such as Abayomi joining and thriving in communities that had an impact. These were communities that were both global and local at the same time. They delivered swathes of meaning, not just to the participants, but also to the organizations that facilitated them. Our friend in Africa was just one cog in a machine that was growing around the world.

His email made two things clear to me. First, human beings are naturally social animals. We have been for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet something magical was happening. This delicious cocktail of technology, connectivity, and people was creating the ability for thousands around the world to come together as a well-oiled (and often rather caffeinated) machine to generate incredible value, far beyond the capabilities of any individual. Abayomi’s passion for the Ubuntu community wasn’t just that he could make an impact; his impact was amplified when combined with other people in the community.

I knew then and there that my life’s work would be to understand every damn nuance of how this cocktail works. I wanted to understand not only the tech but also the people, the psychology, the emotional driving forces . . . anything that could help me to understand how these pieces worked together and what makes the people involved tick. I wasn’t interested in shortcuts. I was interested in understanding how all the pieces click together.

Second, I knew that my responsibility as a community leader was to make sure that Abayomi got the maximum value out of his hour at that Internet cafe. If he went above and beyond to get there, I needed to go above and beyond to make it as rewarding as possible. He, and thousands of others, deserved it.

A QUIET REVOLUTION

The scripture about communities dying was not entirely generational grumblings about the young guns.

Historically, communities used to be distinctly local in nature: they existed in your region, in your town, and potentially even on your street. They manifested in local book clubs, knitting circles, political meetings, gaming clubs, and more. They took place in church halls, schools, and coffee shops. They were often attended by enthusiasts and sometimes by nosy busybodies. New members were typically recruited by bringing friends, word of mouth, posters displayed in businesses, and free ads in the local paper.

These communities were engaging, high-touch, and meaningful, but they had their limitations. There was a limited audience available to attract, and even if you did get people through the door, there were only so many that you could fit into the physical venue.

Not only this, but joining these groups required quite a leap for newcomers. You were asking people to take time away from their families, friends, and colleagues to show up and talk to a bunch of people they didn’t know. This was a tough pill to swallow for many, particularly those who were anxious meeting new people or those in underrepresented groups.

Even if you did pluck up the courage to go to one of these community meetings, there was no guarantee it would be fun or interesting. While some were a fun, dynamic meeting of minds (such as sports fans getting together), some were dry, awkward discussions. These groups often reflected the personality of their founders. The fun ones were generally founded by fun people.

If you made it to the end, after the meeting there would often be no continuation until the next time everyone was back together in person. People would go home and there would be little-to-no communication until they reconvened in the same building the next week or month. It didn’t feel like a community as much as a series of events that tended to attract the same crowd over and over again.

This blend of limitations often nixed the potential of many of these local communities. They were often local curiosities that served a niche audience. Unsurprisingly, some of these communities started to die out, likely contributing to the grumbling from the elder generations about how community wasn’t a thing anymore. Oh, and to get those damn kids off their carefully manicured lawns.

THE MICROCHIP AND THE MODEM: THEY FIGHT CRIME

Aside from the ’90s bringing us hammer pants, bleached spiky haircuts, and awful skateboard movies, we also started seeing the world become more connected.

While the Internet was forged in universities and research campuses in the ’80s and ’90s, it was far too expensive and technical for the general public to use. As the tech became simpler, it became more pervasive.

People want to engage and connect with each other. We want to build relationships. We want to share ideas, information, and creativity. Unsurprisingly, early communities started forming like clustered amoebas in this rudimentary online pond.

In the ’80s, early message boards formed on bulletin board systems such as CompuServe and distributed discussion systems such as Usenet, covering a raft of primarily academic and rather nerdy pursuits.¹ People produced and shared text files containing anything from scientific research, to technology guides, to various acts of anarchy (such as making backyard explosives and pranking your local burger joint).²

This fascinated the early digital explorers. For those technically inclined enough to get connected (often at universities), this global network provided a way to communicate with people on the other side of the country or world. You could discover information that would never be in your local library. It made information and those who produced it powerful.

Given that the early Internet pipes were thin enough to only exchange small chunks of text, these early communities optimized for the best kind of text. One kind was source code, the building blocks and recipe of software.

Back in those early days, software was a closed-off world. Large companies such as IBM, Apple, and Microsoft produced software and kept their code such a carefully guarded secret that the fried-chicken Colonel would be jealous. While this was the norm, one person—Richard Stallman, furious that he couldn’t fix his printer software (because the code wasn’t available)—believed that all software code should be free for people to share and improve.

Stallman kicked off the GNU community, who started making free software and sharing the code on the Internet.³ It was a magical combination: most of the people online back then were techies and programmers. People started to download this code, which was simply digital text, improve it, and share their results with others of a nerdy persuasion. A small library of free tools started to build. This jump-started other communities such as Linux, Apache, Debian, and more.

The Internet became a place where people didn’t just consume knowledge and have discussions; it was also a place where people could build things together. This set off a chain reaction. People built software, shared knowledge, produced educational materials, started websites, and more. Just like Abayomi would experience years later, for every person who contributed, it made the global community even more powerful. The power of the group was getting stronger and stronger.

While the tech was interesting, it was the people and communities that powered this creation that fascinated me. We were getting a taste of what was possible when people connected together digitally, accessed the same tools, and participated in a central community that generated meaningful value for everyone involved.

FIVE FOUNDATIONAL COMMUNITY TRENDS

If we were to slide any of those early communities under a microscope, we would see five important trends. These underscore everything you are going to read throughout this book, and they are the foundation for the incredible value that can be driven by businesses, organizations, and individuals who want to harness them.

1. Access to a Growing, Globally Connected Audience

Unlike the local church group, today we have the opportunity to access a truly global audience. If there are people out there who share your interest, you can build a community. Cheap marketers simply spam this audience, but we are smarter than that. We are going to engage with them, build relationships, and generate and share value together.

2. Cheap Commodity Tools for Providing Access

You can access and harness this global audience with readily available, affordable tools. Heck, you could start a community with free web hosting, a free forum, and free social media networks. The tools are not the most interesting part of the community equation; it is how we weave them into the ways people share and collaborate.

3. Immediate Delivery of Broad Information and Expertise

Unlike the old weekly meeting at the local community center, this global audience is immediately addressable. We can share news, information, education, and more. We can get the word out more quickly and easily than ever before, stay in touch, and build relationships electronically and in person.

4. Diversified Methods of Online Collaboration

As technology (and our broader understandin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1. What Is a Community and Why Do You Need to Build One?
• 2. Consumers, Champions, and Collaborators
• 3. Build It and They (May) Come
• 4. Humans Are Weird
• 5. Create an Incredible Adventure
• 6. What Does Success Look Like?
• 7. Glue People Together to Create Incredible Things
• 8. Mobilize Your Community Army
• 9. Cyberspace and Meatspace: Better Together
• 10. Integrate, Evolve, and Build
• 11. Onward and Upward
• Notes
• Index