The term Community meant something before marketing agencies, corporations and consultants consumed it. Community is the new brand: An amorphous, trendy marketing term, diffuse enough to let you relabel conventional marketing ideas and get middle management to approve your consulting retainer.
“Community” as a marketing strategy looks like this:
- Fire up a Discord
- Appoint a part-time community manager to filter out criticism, reply to people and ask follow-ups to keep the conversation going
- Every once in a while, ping @everyone to advertise something
The above sounds cynical, but I’m not that negative. The reason “community” is so popular is because of all the great examples. The supportive subreddits, devoted Discords and friendly forums. These cozy communities huddle together. They share meaningful interactions while the rest of the internet rages, whines and shrieks.
As communities proliferated, they influenced commerce: Hiking communities love Darn Tough socks while you can spot r/coffee users by their Baratza Encore. That’s when the marketers’ ears perked up. Why keep bombarding people with ad campaigns if people could sell our stuff to each other? I’m all for companies building nourishing communities (should they succeed), but calling your Twitter followers fam, gang or army ain’t it.
The distortion of “community” is most evident in the ubiquity of the community manager. Management implies reactivity. The term has a few definitions:
- administer and regulate (resources under one’s control)
- maintain control or influence over (a person or animal)
- control the use or exploitation of (land)
Viewing community through the management lens means the community must return to the company’s desired state. It assumes the existence of a correct state the community is diverging from, each divergence being an input for the manager to correct.
Before corporations decided communities needed managing, there were moderators. To moderate is defined as “make or become less extreme, intense, rigorous, or violent.” Moderators cull the extreme ends, but let the community grow, diverge and fragment the way it organically does. But before any of that happens, you need something that can grow, diverge and fragment.
I believe design is a better verb for communities than manage. What might community design look like?
Designing means shaping how something works and what it might become. Design is proactive. The process forces you to empathize with people and envision how a community might address them. When you design the right building blocks and let the community figure out the rest, you can create nourishing spaces that proliferate by themselves.
To build a community that feels like members are part of something, stop calling people “fam” in a Discord server and set the conditions from which your community can emerge. Setting those conditions is a design process.