The Foundations of Community
Unlike a lot of traditional / old school / corporate businesses might think, you can’t just create a community out of thin air.
You can’t just buy 10,000 Instagram followers or a 50,000 person email list and assume those people are automatically interested in what you have to say, let alone want to participate in whatever content you’re putting out there. That’s not a real community, it’s just a bunch of people you’re speaking to (or a bunch of bots).
Establishing a community isn’t always so purposeful. While you may start a business with the intent of eventually creating a community around what you do and execute steps to accomplish that, a lot of times your community ends up coming to you based on what you’re putting out there—something I think we’ve done very well with Week of the Website.
Throughout the years we’ve been in business, we’ve specifically shared things based around our business values that allows people to say “Hey! Those are my people. I want to be there.” And we welcome them with open arms! This community also becomes connections. They become people who refer us to their friends, or even their own clients. It's a community, even if it doesn’t traditionally feel like one because we don’t have a Facebook group or twenty mods.
In turn, we support them as well. We’re hyping them up, we’re referring them to our friends and clients, and at what point does “community” just turn into “friends”? In everyday speech, we’re not referring to them as “our community”, we’re referring to them as “our friend did this”, “our friend did that” and I think that’s really the point of community.