The 4 C's of Community

From latest contribution to Ad Age Digital:

Content:
Quality content is a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping will to help build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask yourself. 1. Where will the content come from? 2. Does it provide indisputable value? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre Web 2.0 initiatives such as beinggirl.com, another P&G powered community for female teens grappling with relevant topics have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.

Context:
Context means understanding how to meet people where they are up and serving up the right experience at the right time. Well designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context. For example, Facebook’s recently updated iPhone example is perfectly designed for contextual usage in the go. It’s my favorite way to stay in touch with my Facebook community which I prefer to do while away from the PC. Context means investing time in knowing how your users will want to engage with their community—then enabling them to do so.

Connectivity
Communities thrive on squishy, hard to measure activities that are relationship based at the root. It’s not about a mass communications but more about the micro-interactions which I’ve talked about at great length. Designing experiences which support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder. Communities can in theory be the new CRM (Customer Relationship Management), but require people to be minding it. Community software platforms such as Liveworld software offer moderation services. This should tell you that if you’ve invested in building a community framework, you need to play host if you’re lucky enough for guests to arrive.

Continuity
Communities which thrive often evolve over time to meet the evolving needs of users. As mentioned earlier, we launched Pampers Village which includes functionality such as a baby name finder, parent blogs, forums and a non-traditional navigation design which tags topics and references relevant products. Communities such as this and others need to be flexible to evolve over time while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained over time.
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Comments

[Sean Howard]

Nice! I'm dreaming of the day that clients start with Content and not try to push it off as an afterthought...

Just stumbled on this today... http://nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block

Older but interesting framework to view social networks.

I wish I could think as well as you after three beers. Oy.

[NeilCauldwell]

David, re. 'Content':
This section could tie in with the points made in Connectivity; the most important content in any community network can often be the 'micro-interactions' (e.g. the stuff that powers the Newsfeed in Facebook) that keep people coming back. This paragraph seems geared towards a community site with a very strong editorial presence. Is that the case?

Also, I'd like to think that there could potentially be a fifth C, something along the lines of 'Credentials', i.e. building trusted community member personas.

Congrats on the Pampers Village launch. The tag cloud within a drop-down menu is a nice idea. Over time you could augment the tag clouds based on profile history, e.g. a 'Groups' drop-down tab would evolve to show the logged-in user's most visited groups, rather than vertically listing joined groups with no kind of personalization.

[sapriactivity]

share

[Mark Geljon]

Based on my experience building a local vizthink community, I think that there is a 5th C: Creation. The ultimate state of a community is when its members are collaborating and co-creating... like the model!

[Mark Geljon]

Based on my experience building a local vizthink community, I think that there is a 5th C: Creation. The ultimate state of a community is when its members are collaborating and co-creating... like the model!

[Edith]

Hi David,

great article!
I'm currently working on a presentation in which a slide is talking about 5 C's of social media marketing:

Consumers -> Concepts -> Content -> Connections -> Conversations

I think I will add Continuity as it is a very important point which I didn't mention. Thank's a lot for the hint.

Cheers,
Edith

[Richard Millington]

An interesting read.

A community is the sum of relationships. The real skill is developing the right sort of relationships. You need relationships where people feel they need to keep coming back. Relationships where members are willing to contribute their time and invite their friends.

[Morgan Coudray]

David, those will be the building blocks of the 2015 biz textbooks for Bachelor in Blogging.
@Mark -- great point.. creation is part of content but cannot be ignored! Isn't it what this post is about?

[Clinton Skakun]

David,

The more I read your blog the more I'm inspired to act. You always have something unique and creative to share and it's amazing.

A lot of the suggestions made here by readers are great also.

cheers,
-Clinton

[Sonny Gill]

Great graph and points.

The biggest thing to remember here is when you mentioned micro-interactions. It takes a ton of time to help build and manage a community and requires constant attention. Companies should realize the soft costs of having a community manager that handles all aspects of the community (marketing/customer service/pr/etc.) before venturing out and trying to build one.

[Barry Welford]

Excellent topic, David. I was discussing this in a recent post, Social Media Are Not Communities. I had five characteristics instead of four, but we're very much singing from the same hymn sheet.

[Jason's]

I agree: "I think that there is a 5th C: Creation."