Last year I read a book called The Rise of Virtual Communities. It’s a wonderful book of interviews with virtual world pioneers. My copy is filled with annotations, underlines, and stars or exclamation points. The book starts out with a great breakdown of how your audience probably falls into these four categories:
Customers buy and/or use your product
Evangelists promote your product because they genuinely love it
Community is the group of people who’ve found belonging and utility through your product
Ambassadors are incentivized through payments or rewards to promote your product
It’s incredibly relevant to my work. So naturally, I asked, “But how do fans fit into this? Are they all of these things? Is a fan just an evangelist? Are they their own rectangle?”
I think fans are their own thing. Like I wrote about last week, fans don’t fit into any kind of customer segment, demographic, or consistent buying pattern. They sure aren’t a box or something super defined and understood. Someone can be a fan and never spend a penny.
So if fans are their own thing entirely, I think it hovers over the entire framework. NOT A BOX. Like a cute Lisa Frank inspired cloud. Fans can be a customer, yes. But they don’t have to be. Fans can evangelize, but they don’t have to. Fans can be community members and I believe they need to be a fan before they’re a community member.
Fandom is a prerequisite for community but not a guarantee of it. Most brands, creators, influencers, artists, and companies have fans and call it a community. But community only exists when fans start forming relationships with each other.
There can be a big drop off between fan and community member.
It requires friction (you have to show up), vulnerability (you have to interact), and good design (the system has to enable connection). This is where most “communities” fail. They acquire users and build content but they never create the conditions for connection. So you get audience masquerading as community.
What distinguishes a community is not shared interest, but shared interaction.
Fans love you. Communities connect with each other.
More on this in the weeks to come!
