Defining Community for Businesses
Estimated reading time: 2 mins
The broadness of community is both a blessing and a curse. As a term and concept it can often be hard to explain. Ask 10 different people to define community from the perspective of their company, and you’ll likely get 10 different answers.
This is, by no means, expected to comprehensively define each area of community, but rather, explore the multifaceted definition and appearance of community from a business perspective.
Internal Community
Culture, relationship and the overall strength of the bonds between team members are vital to building a successful company. What better way to achieve this than to apply the principles of community management to internal teams?
An explosion of remote work is driving an even greater need for this role. Remote teams need to be vastly more intentional about building relationships, culture and trust, and there’s no better way to do that than to treat teams as internal communities.
Big shoutout to Carter for working hard to pioneer this space, really excited to see what happens here over the next 3-5 years.
Customer Community
This is what is traditionally considered ‘community’ at companies and what is most often the responsibility of a community manager or community team. Typically made up of customers, though this is changing as more and more companies adopt communities of interest rather than communities of support. The Community Club is a great example of this shift!
External Community
The lines between external and customer community are constantly being blurred. External community tends to be something that marketing is more involved in, and is made up of the entire ‘network of engagement’ around an organization. This might include things like social media, webinars, newsletters, and other programs that can be community-led, while reaching both customers and potential-customers alike.
Market Community
The broader market in which a company exists, made up of other communities, and every person in their target market. While this may not be a ‘community’ that is directly owned and operated by a company, it’s still important for a company to be aware of the sentiment, trends, and ongoing happenings within the broader market.
How might these four ‘communities’ translate and appear within a real company? Let’s use InVision as an example!
Internal - The entire InVision team! InVision is a shining example of a scaled remote-first company, and their approach to internal people ops likely reflects many community management principles to have reached their current scale.
Customer - InVision’s network of customers, living on their support forum, Slack, and social media. Note the overlap with their external community.
External - the broader audience and ‘network of engagement’ around InVision, including Twitter, Instagram and the Design Leadership Forum. The key difference between this and customer is that both customers and non-customers exist in the communities.
Market - the entire design community & market in which InVision exists and includes places such as design Twitter, r/web_design on Reddit and Dribbble.
As community matures within organizations, and especially at companies building communities of interest instead of support, I fully expect to see an even greater blurring of the lines between these four layers of community.
