We have a lot of semantic issues in the social media/online space. The term community is particularly problematic because people tend to throw it around for any online group that interacts with content. The problem for me is that communities are not about content, they are about relationships. Relationships do need content/programs/conversations in order to develop – just like they do in the real world – but just because a large group of people come by regularly and comment on online content doesn’t mean there is a true community.
Now I know, a lot of people are not going to agree with me on this but here is how I roughly define some terms for collections of people:
Group: A relatively small collection of people, most of whom know each other. I would say 80%+ of group members have interacted and formed a relationship with one another.
Community: A moderate size collection of people, a large percentage (somewhere between 30 – 70%) of which know and have interacted with each other.
Network: A large collection of people who are accessible to each other in a particular location but only a small percentage of whom know each other personally – perhaps 30% or less. Networks typically contain groups or communities.
Ecosystem: Intersecting networks, communities, groups, companies, individuals, and other organizations within an environment.
Audience: A large collection of people who experience the same content and may react to it but who don’t have relationships with each other (except for those people they bring with them).
None of these collections of people are good or bad, but they each are effective for different outcomes and trying to get an audience to collaborate with each other will be challenging (not impossible, but challenging). Getting a community to drive traffic is not the most efficient mechanism. For organizations, this means understanding what outcomes are needed and what activities the target population is likely to participate in is absolutely critical. And like the image suggests, you can have groups within audiences or communities within networks – architecting your management solution (which includes tools, processes, guidelines, metrics, people, etc.) to fit your strategy is key – as well as understanding the cycle time and investment that will be required to build out that management architecture.
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Rightly or wrongly, I assumed the term definitions would imply different degrees of interaction/communication/engagement rather than primarily focus on the extent to which the people know each other.
Hi Jon – thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.
Building relationships requires interaction, communication, and engagement so… yes, different types of groupings with different degrees of relationship density imply very different levels of engagement. I believe it’s the relationships, however, that are the main determinate of level of trust and deepness of engagement. Again, that may not be what a company needs – if a big B2C is looking for awareness and visibility, a high relationship density is not important but a broad network is.
Thanks for taking a stab at this.
As a meeting and event professional and a nonprofit employee, I would put a different spin on these definitions.
Group – any number of members (members of a community, a nonprofit, a network, etc.) considered a unit.
Audience – could mean a lot of things. My audience at a face-to-face event actually does have relationships with each other, as they are typically the members of our nonprofit association. They’ve gathered to be spectators, listeners and participants with our content and our content experts. And, they are all related as they work in the same industry so they know each other. Sometimes our audience experiences the same content. Sometimes segments of our audience experience the same content in smaller groups. Sometimes they don’t. Our community is our audience.
Network – for us it is an interconnected system of people, not defined by physical location. We also believe that education is moving to networked learning, horizontal, collaborative, peer-to-peer sharing.
Ecosystem – for us our face-to-face meetings and our virtual experiences are all part of a larger ecosystem that connects with the members of our community. Sometimes we help our network connect with each other. Each virtual or face-to-face event is one touchpoint with a larger context of our community and our association’s mission.
Hi Rachel,
I think it’s great that you took a crack at this.
While I agree with your intent behind saying “it’s not about content it’s about relationships,” (yes the word community is thrown around meaninglessly) I think Jon has an important point. The degree and quality of connection matters a great deal and is the least measure-able thing. This gives businesspeople agita.
Trust and reliability are major goals. I think they are even goals for big companies saying they just want awareness and visibility. Really? Do they want a lot of visibility because their product poisoned someone?
I think the language getting mushed up is part of us all getting much more aware that we all often mean different things when we say stuff. The only way to get clear on whether or not we are meaning the same thing is a lot of checking in and trust building.
The web and business are just revealing our relational nature to people who have lived in their left brains.
Rachel,
I agree with the other comments – nice work on taking a first stab at this – how would you characterize a ‘back-channel’ community, such as one that forms around hashtags on Twitter for conferences/summits, etc?
Clearly, there are going to be some in that community who know each other, a lot that probably don’t, and some that come into the community after the fact and are just surfing through the artifacts.
The reason I ask is I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how these ‘tidal wave’ communities form, disperse, and then toss their info remnants to the shore to be picked up later.
Thanks!
It sounds like you might have a matrix forming! I think there’s enormous utility in articulating these collections of people in terms of how they relate to each other–at the same time, there are clearly going to be different levels of engagement (the “degree of quality and connection”) that Heather notes even within the various types.
I’d be curious to hear Jon’s and Heather’s thoughts on how they’d define those various levels…and even more curious to see how those could intersect with the term you outline.
Great comments – it is a really hairy topic. And while I agree large brands who need large networks want to drive trust in their products, it is a different type of trust – i.e. I can trust that Apple is going to give me a well designed, hip product. I may not trust that they will respond individually if I try calling their customer support line or that they won’t try to sell me something for an big profit because even if I go to a genius bar and get something fixed (and I’ve had very good service from Apple so… not bashing them here), I don’t really have a relationship to anyone at Apple and, in fact, as the user of a consumer good, it is not worth it to me to invest in a relationship with Apple either. Relationships are expensive to both parties.
I guess my point here is that there is a continuum of what it means to trust and the more complex the product and the more critical it is to me personally or for my business, the more I want to have a pretty deep relationship with the company that provides the product/service and their other customers.
Getting back to the group, community, network, ecosystem – I see that as a continuum of trust as well – kind of like a marketing funnel. But Tamsen, I think you are right that there is a matrix and there is another overlay to what it means to be a group/community/etc. – it maybe a “if A + B, than Z” but “if A than null” (sorry being a bit wonky here).
A lot to ponder – and I certainly don’t have the definitive answer and, in fact, from a business perspective I would say the person that manages any of those types of things (often called a community or social media manager) uses many of the same techniques but may prioritize their activities a bit differently.