We’ve already talked about why we need to start shaping and creating communities around our brand but what are the benefits and is it worth the significant effort required?

Well we know from the case studies of Lego, Harley Davidson, eBay, Apple and Sun Microsystems that business communities no matter how big, help us to deal with the ever changing environment and enable us to proactively innovate on a continuous basis. We can’t afford the talent, all the ideas to destructively compete anymore, it makes no economic sense in a world of abundance. There is no sense and therefore no option.

People attracted to our business communities are there voluntarily. They haven’t been imposed upon and are truly motivated to provide opportunities for brands to stretch themselves and move beyond an individuals personal best. Through this we will learn to collborate, an essential skill on anyone’s CV in the future.

Admit it, a new organisational way of doing business is emerging and we are all struggling to adapt and deal with it. The presence of a fully engaged business community will aid that revolution because there is nothing like being in touch with your customers and employees.

Business communities will come up with ideas we hadn’t even thought about. They will open our minds and give us access to knowledge that will send our competitors green with envy. The new challenges we face are just to big and sophisticated for individuals or individual organisations to face in isolation. A community can take some of the responsibility and accountability for these changes and share the burden of finding the solutions. Whilst at the same time you are bonding them to your brand. Making people feel valued brings a return in commitment and loyalty.

The next few blog posts will be about how you start the process of creating a business community that can elevate you above the competition. Don’t forget we are about to go far beyond marketing

If competitive advantage has nervously changed its position to one of constant innovation, talent and customer experience, how do we make a sustainable business out of a profusion of ideas?

A plethora of questions come to mind; How do we work co-operatively with competitors? How do we cope with ‘open’ and ‘free’ systems? How do we innovate? How do we pool resources? How do we retain, afford and keep the best talent? How do we cope with being social? How do we deliver exceptional customer experience? How do we start sharing knowledge when our mindset if one of secrecy?

Business communities and eventually business eco-systems will be created to exploit not just the physical nature of development but the human one to. The challenges we will meet in the future and the answers to the inevitable difficult questions will be met by us all forming business communities around our brand.

Our businesses are already surrounded by an economic web of companies, individuals, suppliers, customers and employees which collaborate, converse, connect and compete on a daily business, building a web of relationships that evolve over time and are heavily influenced by the people involved. Those connections are powerful.

Effectively it is a community of players, within a business environment who have common purpose, share interests and have similar values. All I’m suggesting is that, as a business, we start facilitating and guiding those groups into a business community that delivers both financial and non financial value. We have the platforms and ability to do it now. Instead of spending £50k (or whatever it is) a year on buying people, why not divert it to people that already love what we do and can help us do it better.

All right we’ve talked about the amoeba like qualities of a business community and why we have to evolve from having a static, transactional based database to a space where people who love what you do interact with each other. Sometimes you’ll organise this, occasionally the community will organise themselves. BMW doesn’t organised the Mini Club rally’s that take place on sunny Summer afternoons!

What’s critical in this process and what binds your business community is its connections. The connections between your employees, their customers, suppliers, their customers customers, competitors and you! You’ll map this connection visually once a year (we’re working on a model at the moment.) This will show connection lines, participation lines, influencing lines, prospecting lines and information channels.

Once you’ve mapped it, you can start to influence it yourself. This is where the new marketing tactics have replaced direct mail, telesales and advertising. This is not about stakeholders, like an overladen plane, that really never took off. This is about the regular convening of groups of people, facilitated by you across cross-sections of your business community with common interests. We’ll call them hot groups an evolvement of Jean Lipman- Bluemen and Harold J Leavitt’s idea! Where WOM and viral really can take hold.

It will eventually develop into an eco-system that thrives on information and knowledge flow. It will mean your organisation unlearning and letting go of lots of stuff:

Control to facilitation
Marketing to business communities
Closed to open
Broadcast to social
Restriction to freedom
Management to leadership

I’ve seen this working with a few clients and organisations and its fascinating, powerful, enlightening and inspiring watching companies engage with their ‘database’ sorry ‘business community’ in a very, very different and dynamic way!

Okay I’m going to be writing a lot about business community over the next few months. After what seems like tons of research and development, I’ve developed a framework that takes us beyond marketing that centres on building a community through strong robust relationships with customers and employees. Its nothing new, lots of people are talking about it. My company is just one of the first to create a practical way of applying it that is just so very exciting.

It starts with the end in mind, a business having a productive, collaborative, engaging, inspiring community of people co-creating, innovating and participating in the growth of the company. This is two, multi way stuff at its most dynamic. Its truly powerful and generates principally three results; true customers, true employees and true profits.

What do I mean? Well a business community is what you define it as, what’s specific to your business. Its the hub that’s at the centre of your brand! And, okay, its a space where people who have a common interest meet, share ideas, connect with each other, build great relationships, find mutual benefit and create things that have greater value. The people involved in your business community will take your business places you never imagined.

It’s not your database, although thats where you begin. A database is too static and inert for today’s business environment. A database doesn’t allow you to connect customers to each other. It only shares information one way and, in fact, its just a list. Not terribly engaging is it? Life has changed, customers have changed and so have employees. Social media has overturned how we do business. Meeting peoples expectations is pivotal in thriving and moving from a passive relationship to a fully engaged, demanding yet valuable organic place where great business is done.

Our businesses now need to start the process of growing, facilitating, encouraging and taking part in a business community that flocks to our brands. Its different from a database, it will grow, it will subtract, it will change dimensions, it will have different kinds of influencers, different connectors. It will have power struggles, it will innovate, it will co-create. It will shape your business and you will shape it. It will change everyday. You’ll measure it, you’ll monitor it but you will never rule it.

Gone are the days of sending newsletters out each month, some direct mail, tweeting and blogging. Building a business community goes much further than that. Its got lots of activity, heavy weight influencers, strong connectors, play, interaction and a hell a lot of conversation.

I’ll talk more over the coming weeks about how this will develop, some practical examples and, if you’re interested in your company taking part, get in touch. We’ve been testing for a while but we’re interested in developing this further with local company’s.

There have been a lot of kind words said to me this last week. A huge thank you. I called the book “Hang On” because thats what a lot of people are doing right now along the whole continuum of business. At the one end, you’ve got people who have stalled, are confused and lost. Some look like ‘bunnies in headlights.’ They are struggling with this new way of doing business. They either deny it or ignore it, in an attempt to bide some time to work out what really is going on.

Then at the other end, you have people who do understand it as best we can. They are moving the majority of their communications from broadcast to social both with customers and employees. They are engaging and connecting in a dynamic fashion that, frankly, is a breath of fresh air.

Most of the words from the book were crowdsourced. They are words already finding comfortable slots in the business language thats evolving. There are some, even a few months after its completion, that I would love to include; obsessive, connection, excess, ecosystem, trouble and many more.

As we approach the launch party, well a few glasses of wine and a little networking, it would be great to hear your views on the eBook both good and well, not so good. Its fine I can take it. I’m going to be talking a lot about business community, relationship, connections, authenticity, co-creation and collaboration over the next couple of years. Its important to start that process here.

So if you have any comments, please share with me, what words were most inspiring, which ones I really could have left out. What arguments I should have included and generally lets start the discussion. It would be just fabulous to get some viewpoints. Go on comment below…..

Thanks

It’s easier to maintain the status quo and kill a business, than to change it. The term ‘don’t disrupt for disruptions sake’ just doesn’t hold anymore. Who gets to say that anyway, the boss, who often can’t see the wood for the trees?

Unless you do something, you don’t know whether it will work. Often its the things you can’t see that are the aspects that will cause you problems in the future. Disruption is about finding innovation and innovation is about constantly finding new, improved ways of doing stuff.

Do you spend you’re time fixing things rather than disrupting the core? And what is more healthy; consistently being disruptive, or consistently holding onto what you’ve got? Expect to, in the future, be leading highly talented people who live in creative chaos, rather than the trudging towards synergy.

There needs to be overall coherence to your business but not the routine of sameness. Disruption can bring your brand’s character alive and stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit we all desperately need. Your business is a bubbling cauldron (or it should be) of ideas, thoughts and messing about with ideas. That’s being disruptive.

If it isn’t broken, disrupt it. If you don’t someone else will! Guaranteed.

Despite what we may think, humans need systems and structure. We know groups of people best perform when there is a set of boundaries in place covering expectations, behaviours, beliefs and how things will work. But why do they have to be overbearing, cumbersome and bogged down in irrelevent detail? In their purest form, systems are meant to make life easier when in reality, they tend to double your effort without doubling the rewards.

Systems should demolish barriers, clarify reasoning, promote agility. And, systems must encourage integrity, reputation and calm. A seamless and graceful movement of information, people, money and product. Humanising our systems results in our businesses being centred on the well being of our people.

Take that document you are working on now. Look at it. Can you cut its wording by 30%? Can you cut the number of processes involved without compromising its purpose? Is it a ‘dry’ read, or actually an exciting one? Its the same for the proposal document as it is for the financial procedures. Punch your system in the middle and re design it for the future of your business.

There is a lot of dispiriting going on. There must be something in the air. I’ve made a list:

1. My local Caffe Nero’s not offering free wifi.

2. Companies House making it nigh impossible for you to do business with them, as their website is an entanglement of mush thats completely unusable.

3. The Chelsea Building Society devaluing houses, so on paper you have less equity and they can charge you a higher interest rate. Nice way of promoting customer retention.

4. Biscuits that you used to get in your hotel room, but you don’t now. Cut stuff from behind the scenes, not on the stage!

5. People like lawyers, accountants and public sector workers thinking they have a right to be aloof. Get your parachute chaps, you’re heading for a big fall.

6. People still trying to ’sell’ stuff. Features and benefits is just so yesterday.

7. People using social media to broadcast. In the past we just had companies doing it, now we have thousands of individuals.

8. People who just show up at work, dream all day about doing something else and never get round to it because they didn’t take time out to find their passion and purpose.

Just thought I’d dump that. Ah, feel much better now……..

The world of work has changed dramatically in the last 18 months. Things we did in times of excess will be redundant. Expect sabbaticals to reinvent themselves. In the future these won’t be self indulgent trips to far flung places in the world for a couple of months.

Talented people will still get sabbaticals, but instead they’ll be thrown into a three month project with a supplier, customer, competitor, university or some other collaborative event. Their job to change things, shift the pace, find something interesting, learn and unlearn!

The trouble with online stuff is we forget how powerful offline influencers still are. You can plot this on a continuum. At one end of the scale are the people who aren’t even online yet save email. At the other end are those people who spend most of their lives online. For those of us immersed in online activity, its easy to be consumed by it. Focusing all our efforts around online influencers. And, for us personally to be drawn into influencing online too. Online influencers with significant followers are rarely offline influencers too.

This will of course change. Our offline customers will increasingly participate in online activity and its our job to help them get there. We will all, in the next few years, gain equal status both in the physical and digital worlds. In the meantime we need to take some time out to consider how we help our offline influencers. Some questions to ponder:

1. Who are our offline and online influencers? Name them!

2. What is the real value, not perceived value, of our offline and online influencers?

3. How do we engage on a regular basis with our offline influencers and how do we make it work better?

4. How do we as a business, encourage and practically help offline influencers to start online stuff? This is not an option but an obligation. Its our responsibility.

5. How do we physically meet up with our top 25% of influencers online to cement the relationship?

Its important now to look at converging interactions between the offline and online worlds that are authentic, organic and synergised. Bringing the two sets of influencers together and connecting them could make a whole heap of difference to our businesses.