I’m just reading this great post by Dan Blank on Crowd vs. Community, where he explores the concept of community as it relates to brands. Read the whole thing, it’s well worth it.

Readers of The New York Times are not a community. If you buy Honest Tea every day, you are not a part of a community with every other Honest Tea consumer. But for both of those brands, the possibility of community exists. I have been considering the lessons from Zappos as well. For all their really interesting cultural practices about customer service – do people shop from them out of a longstanding connection that is being formed, or because their prices are great, and their free shipping policy allows us to buy tons of shoes with zero risk? If their prices became average, and their shipping costs and return policy become the same as everyone else, would we continue advocating and shopping at Zappos at the levels we do?

Community requires action. Sometimes, that action is merely a thought process – that someone chooses to trust, chooses to look out for the good of the whole, and not just themselves. But the action of spending money does not always signify that we are ‘voting with our wallets’ and ACTIVELY participating in community that others define.

Without that action, members who share characteristics are merely a crowd – a mass behavioral pattern. Not a community.

When media brands, when consumer brands, when individuals approach social media, this is a key point to remember. That attention alone is not enough to build something of meaning and lasting value – that engagement is required, that action is required to build a lasting community. That spending a dollar with a brand, that following a Twitter feed, that reading an article is not enough of a measure to determine who is within or outside of a community. It may merely be consumption.

Think about this for a minute. We in associations are really, really lucky. Think about all these corporate brands (and small businesses too) that have to work so hard – and very often fail – to create “community” around what they sell. But I think you would agree with me that associations are much more than products and services (even if we sometimes have trouble communicating our value). We have community already. We know in our heart of hearts how to do that. We know how to nurture it – in real life.

We should be ahead of the curve on this now we’re in the digital age.  We just need to own it. We need to stop worrying endlessly about the perceived loss of control, we need to stop fearing new technologies, we need to stop making up excuses about scarcity of resources and lack of easy ROI. We need to learn to translate the offline relationship building we already know how to do, to the online relationship building that requires doing things a little differently, a little more openly.

We are lucky. We have community. Personally, I am thankful every day to be working in an environment that has such a gift. Where we have an innate sense of what community is all about, where we have a core group of people (our members) to start with, where we don’t need to start from ground zero.

Originally posted @ SocialFish