business-of-belonging
The best thing about "Business of Belonging" is its insightful perspective on understanding people and fostering genuine connections within organizations, which many reviewers appreciate for its practical applications in the workplace. However, some reviewers criticize the book for being overly theoretical and lacking actionable steps, making it difficult for readers to implement the concepts in real-world scenarios.
Kindle Highlights: The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage
Highlights
With one-to-one, you’re limited by how many people you can form deep trust and connection with. With one-to-many communication, you can reach more people, but will lack depth. With many-to-many communication, there is no limit. — location: 534 ^ref-37085
we’re now seeing customer support and content marketing give way to a new era of customer relationships: the customer community. — location: 536 ^ref-24390
four factors that contribute to a sense of community: membership, influence, integration/fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. — location: 587 ^ref-11739
think about how to create real community for your people, rather than just slapping the title onto everything. Because if you can create a true sense of community for people, that’s what will make them care enough to contribute. And that’s what will unlock all the business value we’ll talk about in this book. — location: 630 ^ref-43708
When talking about the value of community, people often focus on customer retention, and how being a part of a community will make customers more loyal. This value is big and shouldn’t be ignored, but the BIG competitive advantage comes from how you activate those loyal customers to contribute their energy, knowledge, and skills. It’s their contributions that unlocks scale. It sounds simple enough, but it’s actually a MASSIVE shift in mindset for most businesses. — location: 655 ^ref-5871
Ultimately, what makes a business successful is the same thing that makes a community successful: Owning a topic in people’s minds. Building community is one of the most powerful ways to establish your brand as the most trusted leader in a category, or to get people bought into a category that you’re working to create. You want your community to be the first place people think of when they have a problem that needs solving in your category. For millions of developers, when they get stuck on a problem, the first place they think of to go for help is Stack Overflow. For millions of sales admins, when they have a problem, they turn to the Salesforce Trailblazer community. For inbound marketers, there’s no better resource than the Inbound conference and community hosted by Hubspot. Humans are creatures of habit. When we find something that works, we do it again and again until neural pathways form and it becomes automatic. — location: 705 ^ref-48991
Owning a topic in people’s minds is quite simple (but not easy): you need to successfully solve their problem for them enough times that your community becomes the most efficient and trusted place they know of to get an answer, and they form a new habit. They need to feel confident that if they ask a question in your online community, they will get quality answers in a reasonable amount of time. They need to feel confident that if they show up to your event, the content and the attendees will be high quality, and they’ll get the value they came for. — location: 721 ^ref-64881
two things that every community program should focus on: How it creates value, belonging, and emotional safety for members How it creates value and measurable results for the business — location: 760 ^ref-49064
elements of community are there: symbols, common language, shared sense of identity and purpose, communal spaces, an intentional culture, levels of leadership, etc. — location: 781 ^ref-54222
The community team is responsible for organizing and facilitating spaces for members to connect with each other. — location: 799 ^ref-27957
SPACES Model: The Six Business Outcomes of Community — location: 890 ^ref-52199
All community programs will drive at least one, but often multiple, of these six business outcomes: Support: Customer service and support. The goal is to improve customer support and satisfaction, and reduce support costs by empowering members to answer questions and solve problems for each other. Product: Innovation, feedback, and R&D. The goal is to accelerate innovation and improve your product offering by creating spaces for members to share their feedback and discuss ideas that they’d like to see you apply to your product. Acquisition: Growth, marketing, and sales. The goal is to increase brand awareness, grow market share, and drive SEO, traffic, and leads, by hosting online and offline community spaces and/or empowering ambassadors to create content, organize events, and advocate on your behalf. Contribution: Collaboration and crowdsourcing. The goal is to motivate and accelerate the contribution of content, products, and services on your platform, marketplace, or social network. This is a common objective for companies whose core offering is a community, or is inherently social. Engagement: Customer experience, retention, and loyalty. The goal is to increase customer retention, average contract value, and customer satisfaction by giving customers a sense of belonging and organizing engaging and valuable community experiences. Success: Customer success and advancement. The goal is to make customers more successful at using your product, resulting in increased spend, retention, and satisfaction, by empowering them to teach each other, help each other skill up, and grow in their careers. — location: 896 ^ref-41413
The purpose of a Support community is to create a space where your customers can answer questions for each other. — location: 954 ^ref-36949
Product teams absolutely love having an engaged community that they can always turn to for feedback. — location: 1006 ^ref-36234
For our own product Bevy, it’s rare that a company becomes a customer who hasn’t engaged in the CMX community in some way. It’s very likely that they’ve attended an event and have multiple people participating in our community before they ever get on the phone with a sales representative. Our sales reps love hearing that, because they know that there’s already established trust. That makes their job a lot easier. There’s absolutely a wrong way to use community to drive sales. But when it’s done right, and authentically, it can become your company’s strongest growth engine. — location: 1049 ^ref-41106