This post is not about social media or marketing. It’s about community.
I have had the pleasure of being a part of an online community of game changers defying outmoded business models and testing new ones.
It began with the sharing of a doctoral thesis and turned into a community of 470+ people from 45 countries sharing ideas and contributing to a book on business models entitled Business Model Generation.
The collaboration saw book chunks or chapters released to the community for review and feedback. The path from idea through to book launch can be followed in the video here and you can learn more about the catalyst and author, Alex Osterwalder, here. As well, the book’s producer, Patrick van der Pilj, captured some of the experience.
The collaboration culminated in a conference held in Amsterdam in June, which I had the opportunity to attend and is archived here, followed by the formal book launch just a few weeks ago. You can download a 72 page preview, which I highly recommend.
I have thoroughly enjoyed my involvement in the community because of what I have learned and because of the people that I have met. It has been a phenomenal experience.
I am providing all this history and context in order to ask, with respect to your own work, is there an opportunity to build a community around what you are doing? Can you tap into the interests or passions of your audience for contributions and collaboration and then make the results available to the community and beyond? What could be the halo effect from such efforts? Would it serve to amplify and/or grow your business? Would community members benefit such that they would become evangelists for your efforts? Are they passionate enough about what you are doing or your brand to become advocates?
There has been a lot of talk about crowdsourcing and innovations coming from the involvement of your stakeholders. What I am suggesting has aspects of those but goes further to align it with what motivates people, which is the opportunity to be contributing to and be a part of something bigger. Daniel Pink discusses this kind of motivation in his TED talk.
Why not take a moment to reflect on your work and see if an opportunity to establish and build a community around you exists? Just think about the possibilities, the ideas that could be shared, and the impact such a community could have.
I look forward to hearing the results of your efforts. Keep me posted.
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