A collection of minds together is so powerful that there is no denying the value of communities in each of our lives. It helps make businesses better. It makes activism better. It makes the world a better place. In this episode, Elliot Begoun is joined by Jono Bacon, the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting and the author of People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams. Giving us a peek into his book, Jono talks about the importance of communities in our business, not just on the outside but inside as well. He discusses how we can build a community within our team who can help propel our mission forward and a loyal customer base who can elevate our brand and reputation. Emphasizing the amount of potential when people are together, Jono then shares the ways he fosters it, the tools he uses to keep them together, especially in this challenging environment, and the methods that allow him to make people interested in the business’ products and services.

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People Powered: The Power Of Communities To Your Business With Jono Bacon

I first met Jono working with my business coach and part of the mastermind group I’m involved in. I heard Jono and Michael speak on a podcast and I was blown away. I read his book People Powered. I was at another event where Jono was a speaker. I decided that this was a message that I felt everyone in this community needed to know and talk about the importance and power of community. The way Jono thinks is different and the impact that this can have on all of your brands and businesses is immense. Jono, thanks for joining. Why don’t you introduce yourself and we’ll get this rolling?

Elliot, it’s great to be here with you. Thank you for having me on. My background is that I’m excited about communities. Communities make businesses, activism, and the world a better place. Fundamentally, a community is a collection of minds that have different types of talent, experience, expertise and time. When you can glue these minds together in effective ways, you can unlock all of that potential. I used to lead community for Canonical for the Ubuntu Project, which is a very large open-source project that powers much of the cloud. I then went to XPRIZE where I led the community there, which was focused on these crazy, large-scale incentive competitions.

The first one I worked on was a $15 million prize. It was primarily funded by Elon Musk, that challenged teams to build an Android app for a tablet that teaches children how to read, write and do arithmetic in eighteen months without the aid of a teacher. It was to do with the 250 million kids in the world who don’t have access to education. I went to GitHub and led the community there. Now I’m a consultant and I work with a broad range of companies to help them figure out how do we build a community that helps enable our customers or users, and also helps to deliver our business goals.

I’m quite confident that when you started off in your professional career, it wasn’t your mark towards building community. When was that epiphany or that holy shit moment that this is something that can be a difference-maker? Where did that come from?

I remember it vividly. As a bit of context, I was an eighteen-year-old kid living at home with his parents with long hair and Iron Maiden t-shirt. My hair started growing inwards when I was about 21 and coming out my back. I was interested in technology. I was moaning about Windows one day and my brother had come home to stay for a couple of weeks. He works as a SaaS admin. He was telling me about the system called Linux, which is an open-source platform. This is back in 1998 where no one had even heard of Linux back then. He told me it was this thing called Unix, which I knew was a big, complicated, exciting operating system that runs on big machines with lots of processing power.

You could have that on your own computer. I was working in a bookshop at the time as a part-time job. I used my 10% staff discount to buy the only book that was out back then on Linux so I could figure out how to use it. My brother was sending it from my computer. The first chapter of that book talked about how Linux was built and that there are these programmers all over the world who connected together via the internet and they would write code and then share that code with each other, and build this thing that everybody got to share. The system that they were running, they were building together. It was like building a car while you’re driving along the road. It sounds like a horrible cliche, but that was the light bulb that went off in my head.

The tech was interesting but the big question to me was people who don’t talk to each other in real life, not in the same room and building something together on the internet. How do you do that? I’m the kind of personality where when I get interested in something, it is an obsession. I wanted to know everything about it. I went down the rabbit hole and started learning about communities. I tried to figure it out, but there was nothing out there. There was no information about how to build communities. I had this intuition that this was the right thing and people in the open-source world, the one thing they always talked about, the thing that they cherished almost as much as the tech was the sense of community.

Back in the late ‘90s, at least when I was growing up in England, it was a little different than the US. The internet was not pervasive at all because we had to pay 10 pence a minute to get in line. I had an agreement with my parents where I said for every minute I spend on the internet, I’ll put 10 pence in this box next to the computer. When the bill comes in at the end of the month, you can pay for it. The bill came in £220 and £6 in the box. That’s where it started. I started building a community in the UK around Linux people because there wasn’t a formalized community.

I was bitten by the bug. I wanted to figure out how to do this. As my career progressed, one of the things that started frustrating me was this is too hard for most people. I’m obsessed with it. It’s okay for me to figure out the details because I’m interested in it. If you’re a business or you’re running something and you want to build a community, you shouldn’t have to do the level of work that I did to figure this stuff out. That’s when I wanted to start writing books, running conferences and things like that for how to do it.

As you began to study and put method behind it to teach it, what were some of the insights and takeaways that opened your eyes even more?

There’s a number. As a tiny bit of background, I remember when I joined Canonical, this mystery company was building this version of Linux called Ubuntu. It was founded by this mysterious millionaire from South Africa called Mark Shuttleworth that no one had heard of. His name was whispered around the community a little bit. He was setting up this company and I was one of the first 30 people who went and worked there. I remember sitting in his kitchen in his flat in Kensington. He said, “What do you want to be your legacy in Ubuntu?”

My initial intuition was, “I want this to be a community where people who don’t have neckbeards can be successful, where people can create art, build design, do marketing and organize events.” The diversity of contribution. I realized that that’s difficult. One element was communities have unlimited levels of potential, but you’ve got to be intentional in how you pick your target audience and how you foster it for them. That’s one piece. The other thing that struck me was, I think there’s a lot of intuition in people setting up communities. People form meetup groups, book clubs, meeting circles and things like that.

Where there was a dart of content was in how you interface that with the outside world. How do you find people? How do you onboard them? How do you reward them? How do you get them excited? That is how you build scale. If you want to build a group of 10, 20 people hanging out, and friends hanging out with each other and having fun together, you don’t need to do that. If you want to build a very large community of people who you don’t know will be interested in joining, then you need to be intentional in building that journey. I knew that that was a problem, but it took me a number of years to figure out what the formula was for doing that.

When I was reading your book, one of the takeaways or a-has for me was this concept. We talked about it a bit before we started here of the three distinct different types of community that are important to coalesce around a business or a brand. Can you speak to those for a second?

Part of the challenge here is that the word community means a million different things to a million different people. To some people who are reading, you’ll be thinking of big tech community or big consumer products community. For some people, it will be a reading group or a meeting circle. I break all communities down into one of three models. The first one is called consumer. These are people who get together because they have a common interest. They like the same thing. It might be fans of the Tiger King or Taylor Swift, but they hang out together and you’re part of your tribe. That’s very rewarding and it feels safe for a lot of people. That’s usually relatively simple. You set up a forum or a Slack channel and you go and hang out and have fun.

The second type of community is called a champion community. This is where you go a step further and you champion the thing that brings you together. For example, this is where a lot of product communities form. Fitbit is a good example of this. They have a community of over 1.8 million members. When these members get together, they don’t just ask questions or talk about the Fitbits. They ask questions and they provide guidance to each other. They talk about intermittent fasting and they discuss different exercise models. They create books, webinars, videos and all kinds of additional content. The community starts becoming a content creator, which is incredibly valuable. The third model is called a collaborator community. This is where people build the same thing. For example, open-source and my example of Linux, people come together to build Linux and they share in the creation of that.

The collaborative model can be broken into three pieces. One is what I call inner collaborators, which is people work in exactly the same thing. Therefore, your community needs to be members of the same team. The outer collaborator model is where people will create things that sit on another platform, such as creating a plugin for WordPress or a mod for Minecraft or something like that. Each of these three models has a common thread of psychology that goes through them because we’re all human. We want to build people’s reputations and we do that through generating something called social capital, which is essentially not just when you contribute and you participate, but also the way in which you present yourself, whether you’re kind, empathetic or responsive. That all generate social capital. That builds your reputation.

When people feel a part of something for an extended period of time, usually about two months, which is how long it takes to build a habit, they then build a sense of belonging. Belonging is essentially that mysterious, sticky substance that keeps you involved in a community. That’s what keeps you there because you feel, “This is my crew. If I go on vacation for a couple of weeks, I’ll be missed.” That’s what’s powerful. That flows through all three of those models, but then the technology, the approaches, the incentives and the priorities will vary with each of those three different models.

Let’s take a little bit of a deeper dive into each of the three. What I’ll do is try to bring them specifically to the natural products and consumer package good and scores, and then have you call bullshit on any of the things that I might try to espouse here. If we look at the consumer, that’s the one that most of the brands in this space get. That’s where most of the brands focus their attention. It’s to build that tribe, the fans, the followers who are engaged, talking, and following them on social media and so forth. Is there anything there that you think that as you’ve examined and seen others that maybe is being missed or as an opportunity undeveloped as it relates to building that consumer drive? 

The most important thing, and I would apply this to the consumer, but I would apply this to the other models as well. The big mistake that people make when they start a new community is, they think, “If we build it, they will come. We’ve got an audience of people and we create this cool new environment for people to come and hang out and they’ll show up.” If you build it, they will come doesn’t work. It does work if you give them value. Value to me is the most critical thing. If you set up a community and you’re constantly delivering interesting, relevant, useful information and content discussions, people will naturally show up. I’ll give you a personal example. I pre-ordered a device called the reMarkable 2.

It’s a big Kindle that you can write on because I do a lot of content development and I find I’m most efficient with paper and a pencil because I can get away from my notifications. This device allows you to do that in a digital setting. It’s neat. It doesn’t arrive until November. I joined a subreddit on Reddit that’s all about this tablet. All of the discussion in there is about new reviews that are going on with it like new feature updates that people are discovering. When their tablets are getting shipped and when we can expect to get our own. Every time I go in there, I’ve not posted anything, but the content of the discussion is very relevant to my interest in that particular tablet.

The key thing is as you think about what the value is, so let’s say you’ve got a brand and you want to build a community and you think, “What’s valuable to my audience?” The way I recommend you do this is when you think about your typical audience members, think about what sucks in their life. What is painful for them? What are their problems? What are their roadblocks, and then create your content that relieves that pain? It’s a traditional content strategy, but it works because when most people go out and they have a community or they create content, they say, “Here are these amazing benefits that you can generate.” That can work, but what works much more effectively is saying, “I can make your life easier or more efficient with this information that I’m going to give you.” If you focus on that, then you’re going to get people excited by joining.

We talk about that a lot. The superpower for brands is empathy. What I’m getting is that’s another example or another form of empathy. Let’s jump into the other two. For those who read this often already know that my brain works in abnormal ways so that could every well be me. It was a takeaway of significance about the importance of building a community of champions, especially for early-stage entrepreneurs who are trying to build a brand into Ubiquiti and also need to coalesce a group around them who are going to be evangelical. I don’t think it’s something that anyone puts real focus against or is done with the intention. It’s almost done accidentally. I’m curious as to what advice you would give to those founders that are reading as to how with intention they can begin to build and galvanize a community of champions.

The thing that distinguishes the champions from the consumers is you can think of the champions community as a consumer community with a jet pack attached to it. People still come to the same place where they want to spend time with each other and discuss whatever the topic is. The key is that you convert your members into creators, and that’s a whole separate ball game. Usually, when people start new communities in any form, you have to create a lot of content to get people excited and coming in and solving their problems. A regular stream of content is what brings people in. The great thing about the champion community, first of all, what you do is convert them into content creators and secondly, you essentially make them into ambassadors.

Let’s break these into the two pieces with the content creator’s piece. Let’s say someone’s been in your community for 3 or 4 months. They’re very active and participating a lot. Reaching out to them and saying, “We’d love you to produce a guest post for our blog. We’d love you to participate in a panel discussion or a podcast interview or something along those lines.” In most cases, they will jump at the chance because they’ve already been part of your community. They’ve got some social respect and recognition, and they want to keep that moving forward. That’s one piece. The way I tend to look at communities, and I talk about this in my book People Powered, is that people go through three phases. They start out when you join any community or casual members. You don’t know anyone. You got a lot of imposter syndrome. You don’t know if it’s worth your time.

When you spend about two months actively coming back and building a habit of joining the community, you become a regular. When you’re a regular, all of your initial questions about whether this is worth it have been dismissed. For example, I’m a regular in that reMarkable tablet community that I mentioned. I’ve been there for a couple of months. I’m checking in every day. When people become regulars, they are the perfect candidates to have a conversation about generating content. You start simple. You say, “Would you be interested in creating blog posts, coming on a podcast or doing a video, whatever it might be.”

At that point, your community generating the content, that’s creating even more value for your community. You don’t have to do that. One of the great benefits of the champion community is that you don’t have the burden of constantly keeping things moving forward. The second piece, the ambassador element is that one of the problems with some people who are more process minded is they come up with simple, efficient ways of working, but people don’t like being put into boxes. People don’t like going to work and sitting in a cube and just running through a to-do list. They like having influence over the environment that they’re in. Even if you go to work and sit in the cube, you want a picture of your family. You want to be able to put some sports mementos up and make it your own. What we do for the regulars phase in a champion community, we make them feel like they can provide input.

Ask them like, “How can we improve this? How can we refine the community? What are we doing wrong? What ideas have you got for new initiatives or new things that we can do?” Because then they feel like they’ve got editorial influence in the community. That builds that retention and belonging. Those are the key distinctions. Unlock the content piece and then solicit their feedback and their input. You end up building a community that goes beyond your own wildest dreams because some of the most amazing ideas come from other people.

I want to hit the third one. That is around the collaborator and it’s different in the natural product space. These are food beverage, personal care, pet care brands. There isn’t an open-source community, but there’s a lot of opportunities to collaborate amongst like brands who are after the same community or parts of the same community of consumers and champions. We’ve seen that a lot post-COVID. For example, we’ve had one brand whose founder is also a yoga instructor do Zoom yoga classes for another brand. Those kinds of unique collaborations, giveaways and things along those lines. Talk a little bit about that as it may pertain to where there is an open-source and where there isn’t necessarily the opportunity to build on or bolt-on, but there is an opportunity to come together to serve the same constituency and community.

The first step in doing this, and I had said this to all communities and within your world, is sit down and figure out who are your target audience? What are they interested in? I would break it into three pieces. What are their pain points? What are they suffering from? What are the roadblocks that are standing in the way of their future progress and future success? What are their dreams? What are their goals? Let’s say for the sake of argument, you have a dog food product. What are the pain points that dog owners typically have? Maybe it’s around potty training or obedience.

What are the roadblocks that are standing in the way? Maybe they just don’t have enough time to focus on the obedience training. Maybe they have limited funds when it comes to buying certain dog-related training or products, whatever it might be. What are the desires that they have? What do they want to train their dog more effectively? They want to give their dog a healthier diet. They want to get their dog out and help them to be happier and spend time with other dogs. You think about those different pieces, and then what you do is you design your community around them. For example, if you’re in a dog food community, what I would recommend to somebody is you got a dog food product. When people start buying your product, first of all, get an email list up and running. Get them signed into an email.

Email is an amazing way to nurture people with great content. You don’t send them sales emails. Don’t send them nicely formatted sales. People don’t want that stuff. It’s crap. People want good practical content. You start emailing them content. Then you invite them to come and join, let’s say a forum community that they come into. That’s where you start generating interesting content around things like five tips for simple and effective obedience training. Five tips for how to blend the dog food product with other products to get different flavors and interest for your dog or how to read your dog’s body language. They come in and then what you do is you then have conversation starters and discussions to keep the engagement going.

When you start a new community, it’s a little bit like when you have a party. Do you remember before COVID when we used to have parties and people came to our houses? The first couple shows up at 6:30 when you say it’s going to begin. Another couple shows up around the same time. What you do as the host is you get those people talking to each other and break the ice, and then you can move on to the next group of people and break the ice there. You’re starting these little fires of discussion to get them engaging with each other. We have to do that in communities too.

Once you’ve designed the persona for your audience, what they’re interested in, what their worries are, what their fears are, what their pain points are, you can then trigger lots and lots of those discussions. Before you know it, what’s going to happen is the onboarding would be they hear about your dog food brand. They show up. They maybe go and buy it. Even if they’re not, they sign up to your email list because it looks interesting. You nurture them to join your community. They come into your community. They start getting tons of value out of these discussions that are relevant to your dog. Then before you know it, they’re not just actively buying your product but they’re telling tons of other people that your product is great and there’s an amazing community that’s wrapped around it.

I’m going to jump into some of these questions because I think they’re great, which doesn’t surprise me based on this audience. The first one is, “What has changed or how has the importance or the way communities gather other than the physical nature of it since the outbreak of COVID?” 

There are a couple of things. One is that a lot of businesses were forced into remote working. That was new and terrifying to them. A lot of businesses have now realized, “There’s a lot of potential here.” The problem is when a lot of businesses did the remote work, they thought it was a technology problem like, “What tools do we need?” Remote working is not a tech problem. It’s a culture problem. How do you glue your teams together effectively on the internet and keep them engaged and keep them excited? I spend a lot of time with clients and in helping them to do that. What this has done is it’s made the world aware of online discussion and collaboration, more so than ever before.

A reason why Zoom is such a hot company is because they were the video tool that everybody heard of and then they settled on that. Now people are being productive online. What that’s doing is it’s opening up the floodgates for people to start thinking about building both teams inside of their businesses and communities inside of their businesses, as well as public communities. That’s one piece. The other piece is because we’ve all been stuck inside and we don’t want to talk to our families, we’ve been finding solace in online communities. There’s been an uptick in many different services like Reddit, Google, Meetups, virtual events that have seen an uptick in traffic because people got more time online. Now people are being exposed to communities more and people are innovating.

I mentioned virtual events. In the beginning, when people used to do virtual events, they were all collections of webinars. It’s like a bunch of webinars glued together into one event. We’re realizing that people don’t want to sit on a virtual event all day watching webinars sessions. It’s boring. They’ve got other things to do, and it’s hard to retain their attention. People are experimenting with different models of running virtual events. They’re doing unconferences and they’re having shorter sessions, more focused sessions, panel discussions and fireside chats. There’s a lot of innovation that’s happening there as well. COVID is devastating, there’s no doubt about it. It’s been horrendous for everybody. Everybody’s experience is different. It’s not so much benefits, but the fact that it’s happening at this point in history with this level of online capability is useful.

One of the trends that we’ve been seeing for years is that Millennials are growing up with social technology like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Millennials are expecting to have an interactive technology relationship with the brands that they care about. That’s one of the reasons why Fitbit is being successful. There are a lot of younger people who don’t just want to talk to support Fitbit.com. They want to meet other Fitbit people who are Fitbit customers and talk about not just the products but how they use them and how to be successful with them. This is of the reasons why I wrote People Powered is because a lot of businesses are realizing we need a community because our customers are demanding it and our competitors have got it. This isn’t so much of a nice to have. It’s a have to have. It’s going to become increasingly critical as we move forward.

The point you made in terms of community and a lot of the feedback that I get is the founders of the teams or the brand feel that the content generation and the conversation need to always be led by them. Often times, they can just be the vessel and the holder of that community, and let the communities percolate, grow and provide the things that are necessary to cultivate that conversation similar to what you were saying. One of the questions is, “Where are these communities held?” Our brand for the most part are doing this on social media. For the vast majority on Instagram, a bit on Pinterest, Facebook and so forth. Is there a place that they may explore? Is it Reddit? Is it others that they should think about if they want to put a concentrated effort in creating an effort around building one or all three types of community?

As you can imagine, it’s a bit of a complicated one. It does vary from company or business-to-business. There are a couple of thoughts on this. First of all, you want to build your community where your audience naturally hangs out. If you’re building a community of executives, they’re probably not going to go and hang out on a forum. Engineers will do. Consumers probably will do. You got to think about your audience first like we already talked about, and then think about where they’re likely to spend time. I’m working with a company that’s in branding. We’re building a new community and we’re doing it in a Facebook group because that’s where logically their audience is going to be familiar with.

Teaching people how to use new platforms and software is another piece of friction you want to avoid. When we think about community platforms, we can break them into two broad buckets. One is what I call long-term memory and short-term memory. Short-term memory are platforms like Slack, HipChat, Mattermost, IRC, Gitter, Discord, real-time discussion channels. The benefit of those is they’re super engaging. You can go in there. You can have a real conversation with a human being. They’re very gratifying. The problem with those platforms is they don’t scale. If you want to build a community of 10,000, 20,000 people, the problem with it is that it’s a stream of consciousness. Therefore, there’s going to be a lot of different discussions going on in the same thread, at the same stream of consciousness. It can get very confusing.

Your experience on those platforms is fundamentally dependent on if somebody is online at that particular moment. Let’s say I go into dog food Slack, and I go and ask a question about dog food, and then someone provides a response. If somebody comes and asks the same question a couple of months from now, ideally that previous discussion should be visible. It won’t be because searching history on those kinds of platforms is terrible. Slack try to claim that you can find things in Slack history, they’re lying. It’s bollocks. It doesn’t work well. The alternative is what’s called a long-term memory platform, which is like a forum or a Discourse or Vanilla or something like that.

The major benefit of this is people go and ask a question, and then finding that question and answer discussion is much easier because everything’s indexed into the platform itself. Most importantly also, those discussions that occur there, if your forum is open, which I would always recommend getting indexed on Google. This is a fundamental benefit. The place where people go and try to solve problems is one of two places. It’s either Google or YouTube. Those are the two places where people are typing questions. If you type your question into Google, ideally you want your forum to come up where someone asks that question and they got a response, and then it takes them to your community, and then they start getting to see it and browse it. That’s how I discovered the reMarkable tablet subreddit. I found it from another post and now I’m hooked in.

The challenge with those platforms is they are a little bit less gratifying than asking a question and talking to a human live, but they provide a much more stable foundation for engagement and discussion. The other benefit of those platforms is you get way better analytics. I can find out what proportion of people are active, I can engage with them more effectively, and I can subdivide them into groups. There’s a lot more that you can do, but you need to determine whether that’s the right thing for you. The outlay here is there are 180 million Facebook groups.

The great benefit of Facebook is if there are posts and discussion within a group, it appears in the Facebook notification tray. Even if you’re not in the community, you’ll often see it and get exposed to it and that can pull you back in. Facebook is dead simple to get up and running. The benefit of Facebook is there are a billion people on it, so they know how it works. You don’t have to teach them anything particularly new. That can be another alternative but that content is not index on Google. If you want to try and bring in lots of cold traffic into your community, it’s a little bit more difficult.

Most of our brands and most of the brands in this space spend a vast majority of their efforts around building community and building awareness through traditional social media channels, Instagram, Facebook and so forth. The challenge that I see with it and one of the things that we admonish our brands to be better at and to be focused on is to make sure that that is a two-way conversation when they engage in the content to engage them back. As you describe in particular with the forum, would it be wise if they’re wanting to do that or if they’re wanting to begin to build more explicitly, to begin to promote that forum on their social media or website and talk about it and drive people there to have that conversation. Is that how you begin to foster that and develop it?

You hit the nail on the head, Elliot. You touched on this as well when we talked about the difference between broadcasting out to your audience and having a more interactive relationship with your audience. That’s where the internet has fundamentally changed everything. There is a responsibility with content creators, communities, and businesses to have an interactive relationship with their audience. Specifically, to your question about forums, one of the things I recommend to all of my clients when they have any public-facing community such as a forum, is this is a hub of activity. There’s going to be some amazing insight, discussions, and ideas that are going to brew inside of that place.

You want to pull those out and showcase them on your social media platforms because it’s going to show this good stuff out there in your community, and it’s going to show that you are open to your audience having influence, having ideas, and playing a role in your future success. That in itself is important. We can do it in many places. I’ll give you a practical example. Weeks ago, I sent an email out to my email list, people who sign up for my email. I just said, “What’s in your mind? What are you worried about? What are you struggling with? What do you want to know?” I had about 50 or 60 responses within two hours.

The reason why I asked this question was twofold. One was, I want to build a relationship with my audience. What I did is I used this tool called Loom, where you can record videos in your web browser and you can provide a link to it. For about 25 of those responses, I just sent people like 3, 4-minute videos, sharing some feedback and recommendations based upon what they were experiencing. That’s going to be useful to them but they’re going to tell their friends. They’re going to say, “I joined this guy’s email list and he responded.” One of the first questions I have on my email list is, “Tell me what you’re looking to achieve.” I respond to pretty much every one of those emails because I want to build a relationship with them.

The second thing is that those 50 emails gave me an amazing data on what my audience is thinking about. What do they care about? What they’re struggling with? To me, it’s about how do you systematize with a large group of people an active and ongoing relationship? If I’m being honest with you, most brands don’t do this. You sign up to someone’s list, you go to that community. You don’t hear from them. You hear from your community members. The business is being active, being a member, engaging and doing it on social media and responding. When someone replies to you on social media, respond to them. It’s all about building those relationships.

I’m curious about this concept around the forum. You’re the expert so tell me if my thinking is flawed, but what I see a lot especially as it relates to this business, a lot of what we see in content or a two-way content could be a recipe generation. It could be for a health and wellness product. It could be a health result or a way it’s being used. There are a lot of our brands that are lifestyle brands that are particularly focused towards a specific lifestyle diet or lifestyle activity like keto or plant-based, etc.

When that interactivity or that moment shines on Instagram, it’s just a moment. There’s no indexing. There’s no ability to go back. There’s no ability to see what’s been talked about. I’m intrigued by this concept of investing energy and time into driving people towards a forum where they can communicate with each other or you can communicate with them and where there’s this developmental activity. Maybe this is your community of collaborators that go there where you’re trying to build on the way the products are integrated in people’s lives because most of these products or lifestyles. Our brands are either solving a problem that’s very acute or meeting an unmet need. That’s why they’re there. I’m curious as to your thought as it relates to non-tech or it’s a more analog type of activity. How do that play into that setting? 

The thing is if you look at the majority of inbound traffic on the internet, it all comes from Google and social media. That’s where your audience is living. If you want to get people into your community, we need to deliver an amazing experience on Google and social media. That’s why providing your community is a place where people can ask questions about your product or where they can talk about how they can be successful with your product. I use the example of Fitbit. Success with Fitbit isn’t about getting fit. It’s not about whether you can use the Fitbit tracker. Success with a vitamin or a health product is not about whether you take it. It’s about whether you get the kind of health results that you’re wanting.

Your product is used as one tool within a future success state. It’s about zoning in and what that success state is and helping your community to be a place where people can do that well. Another comparison would be music. People don’t buy musical equipment because they want to learn how to use the equipment. They want to buy it so they can make great music. How do you write great songs? How do you create amazing melodies? To me, that’s the critical thing. It’s broadening the tent a little bit beyond your product. Too many companies have their support like Zendesk where they take tickets and questions, or they have a customer support line where they answer questions about that product.

It’s all about the product. Too many businesses don’t realize that your customers are only partially interested in your product. What they care about is the outcome. That’s where the community can be so powerful because your community members are more equipped than you are to know how to use your product and how to apply it and getting that outcome. When you glue these people together and they’re having conversations on a forum, Fitbit is an example. I saw an amazing discussion about intermittent and fasting, which I was interested in exploring. It’s nothing to do with Fitbit, but that conversation happened on the Fitbit forum. I went there, read that, I learned about what a Fitbit is, and then bought one of their products. That to me is the key. If you do it on a forum, it gets indexed on Google. You highlight these amazing interactions on your social media networks. Before you know it, you’re growing your business and most importantly, you’re building an amazing relationship with your audience.

You mentioned a few of the forum platforms. Is there any specific that you think in the consumer world and the CPG world that make more sense than others?

There’s a load of platforms out there. I’m sure many of you who are reading this will be thinking, “Those ugly, antiquated online chat forums.” Forums now are a lot better than they used to be. I’m a big fan of a platform called Discourse. It’s completely free and open-source to use, but they have a company that hosts it and you can pay for it to be hosted. The reason why I like it is it’s simple. It’s easy to use. There’s great data inside of that. It’s well-made product, but there are lots of them out there. There’s Vanilla, Khoros and Lithium. The problem is that people get attracted to the bells and whistles of these platforms. Then they turn all of these things on but the most important thing is start simple. Make it as easy for people to join browse, great content, and start having good discussions. You don’t need leaderboards. You don’t need rankings, all this kind of crap that gets in the way. Focus on the discussions. That’s the most important thing. Discourse is what I would recommend you to start with.

Jeff has a question here. “How do you develop a community when the interest of the brand may cover a broad spectrum of interest?” Healthy living is broad. If you go specific, do you eliminate people from the brand?

The key thing here is you want your niche to be as tight as possible, but with the broadest possible audience. For example, my niche is building communities. I’m not a marketer. That’s a very broad tent. I would look at in your world, Jeff, in terms of a healthy lifestyle and healthy living, what is going to be your niche within that? It could be food or exercise. It could be even narrower. It could be organic. Start there. The problem is if you’re too broad, if your community is just healthy living, first of all, there are other communities out there that are doing that, but secondly, the conversations will be too generic.

You want to bring people in who are very interested in the same thing. My example again is this new tablet that I bought. Ignore the fact that its tech. This could apply to intermittent fasting. It’s people who are very interested in one specific thing. It is difficult for me to get too specific here, but I would look at how do you find something that’s unique and new to you, whether there is another community out there that’s focusing on it, but it has a large enough audience where it can build the growth that you want. You ideally want to have an audience of at least 4,000 or 5,000 people to make it worthwhile.

A follow-up to that on my own and that is a way to view it or think that through is about where you can add the most value as a brand. Where you have the most to stay or the most to contribute and where you can cultivate that ground to encourage that conversation.

If you’ve got a lot of input and leadership there, then it’s going to be even better. This is where the content piece is important. My old boss at XPRIZE, Peter Diamandis once said to me, “It’s not about having all of the answers. It’s about packaging up the right answers for the right people.” He’s completely right. To use my dog food example, there are lots of people out there who are very expert experienced in terms of dogs. If you have a dog food product and you want to focus on a dog’s diet, talking about different foods and their impacts on the dog. We all know that dogs shouldn’t eat chocolate, but what about cheese? What about asparagus? What are the right things that you should give dogs? What are the health impacts? If a dog is going through a different episode like a dog has just been muted, what kind of food should you give them? All those things can be specialties of content that you can put out there.

Two more questions here that I want to make sure we get to, one of them is around influencers and influencer marketing and its role. In this space, this is all the rage. Everyone’s talking about the importance of influencer marketing. The question is, “What role does influencer marketing play in the development of the community?”

Influencer marketing is interesting to me because it’s clearly getting some results. What I don’t know is how rigorous those results are. To me having a ton of Instagram followers doesn’t mean anything because a lot of people can go and buy those followers. Being followed by a bunch of bots isn’t useful. What I want to know is how is the influencer marketing genuinely impacting your customers and the quality of your business? The jury is a little bit out on that if I’m being honest with you. The other thing, just to be completely honest, as an English guy, I find especially the American influencer marketing to be nauseatingly annoying. These people were constantly propping up their narcissistic tendencies on Instagram. It’s irritating.

To me, I wouldn’t put too much into an individual. The other problem with influencer marketing is it’s tied around an individual’s personality. People can be fickle. They can move on and relationships can break down. I would recommend influencing based upon your content and brand. Instead of Tai Lopez talking about your content, sharing that expertise, make it about your brand sharing that content or expertise, and having that personality. A good example here is the fast-food chain, Wendy’s. Everybody here should go and check out their Twitter feed. It’s hilarious. They’ve clearly hired some standup comedians. They’re constantly poking fun at McDonald’s, Burger King and things like that. It’s not coming from the person who’s working at Wendy’s, it’s coming from Wendy’s. That’s what I would recommend focusing on.

I think part of that also is finding your voice and developing your own thought leadership. That’s critical. That dovetails well into this question. The question here is, we’ve talked a lot about how we build community, but how do we become a part of a community? As a founder and as an entrepreneur, how do I look to engage in communities that can help me become a better founder, a better entrepreneur?

You got to eat your own dog food. The good news is that there are millions of communities out there. Just go and pick an interest. It doesn’t necessarily you have to be with your business. If you’re interested in the new PlayStation 5, go and join the PlayStation 5 community on Reddit. If you’re interested in vegan diets, go and join the vegan community. Just go and hang out and do what I call community hacking, which is go and look at what’s going on. Look at the kind of content that they’ve got out there. Look at the kind of discussion that’s happened. Look at the tonality of the discussion. Look at the level of participation from the people who were running the community. Let’s say you go and join the community wrapped around a business. Let’s say it’s Wendy’s. I’m sure they’ve got a forum somewhere. How much Wendy’s staff participate in engaging? Take notes and then apply that into your own world.

To do communities well, you do have to know what it feels like to be a community member and ideally know what it feels like to be your audience. One of the things I would recommend to everybody is when you kick off a new community, one thing that I always do is what I call an early adopter initiative. That’s where you pick 20 or 30 of your customers, who you know personally, who are excited about what you do and you bring them in first. Let’s say you set up a forum, you bring them in and start with some content, some discussions and get their feedback. Ask them, “Is this interesting? Are you enjoying this?” This is going to serve you two purposes. You’re going to get great feedback and data about what you can fix and refine. Secondly, it’s going to make those people feel special and they are going to be the earliest elders in your community. When you kick the doors open and the general public comes in, those 20 or 30 people, or 15 of them as the most active people, they will go and mentor and guide your new people who come in as well.

I want to get this one last question, and then I want to give you an opportunity to give people more information about where they can find your books and resources, etc. This is from Dan and that is, “What role does the community have on social proof and social proof have on the community?”

Social proof is critical in any kind of sales process. People need to know that it works and testimonials, endorsements and things like that are critical. The good news about a community is that by definition your community is going to be your biggest fans. They’re going to be the most engaged people. They’re a great source of social proof, endorsements, reviews, your community agree on them. In terms of social proof as a means to get people into the community, the social proof is going to be that the community is valuable to them. For example, when you’re encouraging new people to come into your community, showing that there’s a regular drip-feed of content, value, great discussions or interesting insight is going to be critical as well. Throw away that notion of if you build it, they will come because they won’t. You need to bring them in. You need a carrot that you can dangle in front of them to get them in there. I think it can work both ways.

I’m going to squeeze in one last question and that is, “How do you deal with people that come into the community with negative input or feedback?”

Psychologically, human beings tend to mimic our leaders. A lot of this will be handled by the way your leadership and your community approaches things. If you have a very productive, constructive, empathetic environment, then it makes it more difficult for people to come in and be disruptive and be negative because it’s socially awkward. You wouldn’t walk into a party and start screaming at the host. It’s socially not done. The second thing is the way in which you react to that is critical and it sends enormous messages to everybody. Imagine someone comes into your dog food community and says, “Your product sucks.” Instead of just deleting the posts or dismissing them, dig in and say, “We’re sorry you’re disappointed, but let’s explore more about why that is. Can you tell us a little bit about the product? Why that’s the case?”

First of all, in many cases, they won’t have anything to say and that will immediately discount that particular individual. Secondly, in many cases, what will happen is you’ll have an interesting discussion about deficits and your product, and your community members will look at that and think, “Elliot was cool in how he reacted to this frustrated person and managed to rectify the situation.” In many cases, the individual who comes in who’s pissed off is going to then have a radically different view and say, “That was a cool way of handling it.” You convert them into a fan. This has happened to me tons of times over the years, especially when I was at Canonical and the open-source world is filled with very opinionated people. Some of the most critical people that we had in our community are now close friends.

I’ve heard this for a long time. When you fall short of meeting expectations of a consumer, that is the best and biggest opportunity to build a meaningful, evangelical follower, whether it’s that person or the people who are watching the way you show up to that. You should invite that in. Because if everyone comes in and says, “We love your product. You’re the best. We use it every day.” You’re not having any opportunity to show up. It’s when that person comes in and says, “This was a piece of shit,” that you’re able to engage. Failure is a great teacher.

It’s just not real. Life isn’t that peachy. It’s just that you’re pissed off customers haven’t told you yet.

They’re not showing up there because they don’t feel safe there. One of the things around a good community and the importance of constructing a community is having a psychological safety that people feel like they can communicate and express their opinion openly because that’s where vibrance comes from. Jono, thanks for doing this. How do people learn more about what you’re doing about community? I know your books and lots of YouTube videos, but share a bit more and make sure everyone knows how to find you.

My website is JonoBacon.com. One thing that people may be interested in here is I put up a page on my site. If you go to JonoBacon.com/pack, you can grab a couple of free chapters from my new book, People Powered. Also, I send people practical and useful content via email. I also provide free trainings to people and all kinds of good stuff. That’s probably a good place to start. I’m an open book. If you’ve got any questions, drop me a note at [email protected] and I’m always happy to connect with people.

Thanks for joining. Thanks for reading the episode and have a good day.

Important Links

• People Powered

• reMarkable 2

• Fitbit.com

• Discourse

• Vanilla

• Khoros

• JonoBacon.com

• JonoBacon.com/pack

• [email protected]

About Jono Bacon

Jono Bacon is a leading community and collaboration speaker, author, and podcaster. He is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting which provides community strategy/execution, workflow, and other services. He previously served as director of community at GitHub, Canonical, XPRIZE, and OpenAdvantage.

His clients include Huawei, GitLab, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Sony Mobile, Deutsche Bank, Santander, HackerOne, Mattermost, SAP, FINOS Foundation, The Executive Center, data.world, Creative Commons, and others. He is the author of ‘People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams’ and The Art of Community, a columnist for Forbes and opensource.com, founder of the Community Leadership Summit, founder of Conversations With Bacon, and co-founder of Bad Voltage. He is an advisor to AlienVault, Moltin, data.world, Mycroft, Open Networking Foundation, and Open Cloud Consortium.

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