How to Kill Your Digital Community

Have you noticed? Community has become a hot topic.

This is especially true for folks who realized during the pandemic that if you rely on in-person ANYTHING to create a connection between people and your organization, you have a pretty big Achilles heel just waiting for its own poison arrow. “Digital placemaking and IRL community” are the order of the day.

As a result of this attention from the top, services and products are now “Better and Improved!” with our special secret “Community Building Booster” sauce that will practically guarantee a robust community with your signed contract!

Except that’s not how community works.

Similar to trust, you can’t really buy community. You can buy a community platform. You can buy a community t-shirt. But community is an ongoing continuous investment of time, talent, and energy that is both simple and complicated at the same time.

So, instead of offering you a list of ways to build a healthy community, I figured I’d approach it from the opposite angle and share how you can kill it.

If you are on a mission to build a community, consider this your list of things NOT to do. Ignore it at your peril.

How To Kill Your Community

  1. Lie. – Lies big and small will kill a community. Lie about why you created your community. Lie about who really backs your community. Lie about your community’s funding. Lie about why you’re promoting something to your community. Lies will inevitably beget other lies and lies will often be exposed. When you lie to your community or about your community, you will lose trust. Once you’ve lost trust, you’ve definitely invested in effectively killing your community.
  2. View your community members as transactions. – You know how in cartoons when one character who is looking for money sees an opportunity in another character and so their eyes change into dollar signs? That’s kind of what really happens when some community managers look at their members. Almost immediately, they are pitching something – either to sell or they are trying to use their community members to create content they can then turn around and sell to others – and the whole exchange is very transactional.
  3. Focus on pushing out content and NOT on creating opportunities for community members to connect with each other. – So often well-meaning community managers will get caught in the cycle of posting content and promoting resources, benefits, and events, that they’ll forget about engineering ways to connect members to one another. If you want to kill your community, just push and don’t look for ways to make it about more than the brand or the person.
  4. Create a cult of personality. – Make it all about the person leading the group. This can work for a little while. Until it doesn’t. The fall will happen when the person is found to be human with human flaws. Focus on bringing people together with each other around a common purpose, rather than a person.
  5. Build it and (expect that) they will come. – You can have great technology and even a great community strategy, but without the hard work of cultivating the relationships, especially at the beginning of the community creation, your community will likely die.
  6. Don’t have a principal community manager or any ownership over the community. – I’ve witnessed so many organizations make the mistake of just placing a number of members into a community and expecting them to naturally engage with each other and to keep coming back to do it. And so far, for the 30+ communities I’ve watched or heard of this happening in, it has never, ever worked. You need at least one person checking in with a community and making sure that communication and value are taking place. If you aren’t going to take the time or money to invest in this role, then you should probably wait on attempting to start a community.
  7. Stay the same when you notice the members or the members’ needs change. – Failing to adapt to the changing needs of your members will help you kill your community. It is hard to change, especially if your community has experienced success in the past. But when all the signs point to declining engagement and a sense of staleness, then the time has come to reassess what your community is all about and if it is still serving the needs of its members or even its original purpose.
  8. Expect the number of members to be the most important metric for the community. – Stop it. Just stop it. This is silly. If you have a million members in a community, but no one doing anything in it, then you have a mailing list, not a community. You’ll hear community pros say all the time, “start small!” But what you’ll hear only a little less often is “smaller is better” and the reason is that it is a lot of hard work to engage and effectively manage a community full of members who, if you are doing your job right, are active within the community. You want happy, engaged members. A core group of 100 engaged members is better than 10,000 disinterested members. If you focus on just increasing the numbers, you are missing the point and likely on your way to killing your community.
  9. Don’t measure. Don’t track. Don’t test. – Just fly by the seat of your pants. And then you’ll kill your community.
  10. Don’t test and improve. – Just keep doing what you’ve always done and do that over and over. Do it for more than one community. Get a reputation around all the community managers, start wearing all black, and become known as “The Serial Community Killer” so you can be featured in a TV crime show series.

For ideas on what you should do, please subscribe to the YouTube Playlist for “Why Community Matters” – a series of short videos featuring ways to build healthy, thriving communities!

Also, I’m sure I missed something in the top 10 that you might think is a critical omission. Please comment or share with me on Twitter what needs to be added. I’d love to hear from you.

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