Businesses can stumble badly in their financial projections if they over-estimate customer adoption rates. And if you work in product marketing or sales environments where everyone must “drink the Kool-Aid,” you’re potentially at risk, especially in B2B markets.

In consumer markets, where the decision maker and the end-user are often the same person, motivational issues are less likely to affect post-sale adoption rates (unless the product is a “lemon”).

By contrast enterprise employees have relatively little control over the choice of technology-related tools they must use at work. Faced with a mandated change, employees may have all sorts of conscious or unconscious reasons to stall or minimize use of the new tool or application. Especially if it requires behavior or process changes, or new learning. Passive resistance flourishes — which is bad news for sellers counting on rapid uptake of their “Kool-Aid.”

People are resistant to change, for lots of reasons, including unconscious biases. One such bias is people’s tendency to highly overvalue the status quo.

Entrepreneurs and salespeople also suffer from biases, what I call “the Kool-Aid factor,” a form of irrational optimism. This can cause them to over-estimate the speed as well as the degree of adoption for new enterprise applications or other types of employer-mandated tools and resources. Sellers often have inflated views of the value of what they have to offer, relative to the prospective end-user’s perception of its value. Add in the end-user’s inflated perception of the status quo, and you have a sizable value gap.

As shown here, the combination of these flawed assumptions can lead to almost a ten-fold value disparity (thanks to Joyce Hostyn for the infographic):

Why? There are significant cognitive biases and psychological barriers to adoption that sellers overlook at their peril.

A thoughtful post by Open Text’s Customer Experience Director, Joyce Hostyn, outlines her thinking on the stages that people must pass through before they’re willing to change habits or adopt new applications at work. Joyce also points to several must-read articles on the topic.

Her visualization of the stages people must pass through before they become advocates or champions of the “next new thing” is quite helpful. Although aimed at customer experience designers, Joyce’s diagram of the experience journey offers a useful POV for people who forecast revenues tied to assumptions about adoption scenarios within enterprise environments.

If you must “drink the Kool-Aid,” take note of your customers’ motivational climate, and factor in how their adoption journeys will affect your product/service uptake.

Lately I’ve been coaching some entrepreneurs as they prepare their investor pitch to prospective angel investors. One of the recurring challenges with their draft pitch is a lack of clarity on:

• who needs the product (and why)
• who can pay for it — who has the budget and/or the authority to pay for it
• what customer segments do they plan to target, and how might this evolve over time
• the paths the company plans to go to market: how will they sell and support the product, direct via their own employees or indirect through some distribution or partnership model (including online models)
• how money flows through this market ecosystem, if that’s not already abundantly clear

Because entrepreneurs are fueled by passion for their product, that’s where they focus their attention during the pitch. Lavishing us with all the details about why the product is so cool, and why the competition won’t have a chance… But investors want to understand how and why there’s money to be made if they invest in this emerging company.

And that means we need to understand the market dynamics: who the customers are, what’s their compelling reason to buy, and where the money comes from.

Particularly in complex markets (like life sciences or healthcare) it’s incumbent upon the entrepreneur to insure the investors understand these issues. Follow the money.

Without a vibrant market of paying customers and efficient routes to market, investors will never get their money back. And until they believe there’s a solid market opportunity, most investors will shy away from funding the entrepreneur’s venture — no matter how unique or sexy the product.

Thanks to the Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified, we now have a framework for deciding how to measure progress with social media marketing — a draft model that’s worth talking about. Both firms have introduced this framework with an explanatory white paper on the co-authors’ respective blogs. Courageously, they’ve done so under the “Open Research” model to galvanize industry-wide commentary and collaboration so the framework can be refined and extended.

Put It in Context

Their paper advocates positioning this framework within a larger planning context, so the social marketing objectives align with the organization’s broader goals and KPIs. To me this is a key point, and one that’s often overlooked in the euphoric hype that tends to surround “social.”

If you narrowly measure social media tactics without aligning them to a larger strategic context, you’re just measuring activity. (That’s like measuring reach and frequency in the old realm of advertising.) The question is, how will those activities help drive business results? How do they link to your most valuable customers or prospects? Which influencers have the most impact on the people you care the most about?

Which are leading indicators, and which are trailing? Which measures will drive actionable insights, given your strategies and key business drivers?

The authors of this framework are well aware of these issues; however, the framework won’t achieve its intended purpose if it’s not set in the right context. That’s the job of the social marketing team, with potential help from their advisors; and it must be negotiated with the business- and line managers inside the enterprise.

Where This Framework Will Be Most Effective, And Where It Won’t Be

Like the social media monitoring technologies themselves, this model is best suited for larger, established organizations, ideally those serving gazillions of consumers; companies blessed with household brand names — or existing marketplaces where conversations among consumers or a company’s partner base are frequent, voluminous and well underway.

At their core these technologies require significant activity volumes before underlying trends start to become apparent or predictive. Sadly, if you work for most start-ups or new ventures, there’s less out there to be measured and analyzed.

Similarly, if you’re in a highly specialized B2B niche, you may find yourself struggling to find those needles in the proverbial haystack. Or worse yet, you may not know where the conversations (sparse as they may be) are taking place. Where the heck is that haystack, any way?

You’ll be challenged when the most important conversations take place behind “pay walls” that are inaccessible to most of the monitoring platforms, unless (a) you own the pay wall and have the wherewithal to help the platforms’ developers troll your content, and (b) their business model and technology strategy enable them to do so. That said, this sort of customization tends to be costly.

Case In Point: SMB

Here’s what confronts a certain 3-year-old B2B technology start-up with revenues measured in the tens of millions. Before beginning a coherent social plan, this firm’s brand name (their company name) averages only 3 mentions a day — and that’s before filtering out the mentions that have originated from the company itself or its employees. No one is talking about them, online at least. And yet, they’re generating revenues. (There are other indicators of marketing fragility, which the company has discovered by analyzing internal data sources, such as customer spending patterns and churn rates.)

To be fair, this should be viewed as a benchmark: the situation pro ante, before they begin any social marketing programs. This company has functioned without a marketing department (or marketing budget) for most of its history, as you might surmise from this chart. (And yes, they’ve just hired a marketer, so hopefully this picture will look a lot more attractive a year from now.)

It’s obvious that one of their first challenges will be figuring out what their customers want to talk about, the issues on their mind, and where those conversations are already taking place — the conversations out of “ear shot,” as it were. Fortunately, they have begun a real-world dialog (by phone) to hear what’s on their customers’ mind.

But they’re not alone.

New Business Objective: Discovery

This is an area where I see recurring limitations in today’s platforms for social media monitoring: the early discovery process for B2B markets.

This a painful and highly fraught phase: when you don’t know what you don’t know. And as most strategists recognize, it’s the things you didn’t know that you should have known that are most likely to kill the company.

So my personal addition to this framework would be a new row linked to a business objective called “Discovery.”

The purpose of the “Discovery” phase, which should precede the “Foster Dialog” phase, is to uncover what people want to talk about, what’s on their minds, etc. This could help reveal unmet needs or latent opportunities that could be ripe for the right companies, value propositions, ventures, nonprofits, what have you.

A related goal is to discover who is talking or blogging, where and when, and what the general “social technographics” profiles are for people in this arena, as described on in Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, and on Forrester’s groundswell blog. (Charlene is now a partner at Altimeter Group, one of the two firms that sponsored the research that resulted in this proposed social marketing analytics framework).

And because this phase generally occurs during the unfunded, or under-funded stage of a company or product lifecycle, the tools and technologies available here will have to be affordable — or they will remain out of reach and under-utilized by the start-up community, category pioneers, and other entrepreneurial innovators.

I came across an interesting blog post today about the differences between active versus passive discovery on the part of buyers and prospects, and what that implies for messaging architectures — and by implication, for outbound marketing plans.

Most of the tactics based on SEM and SEO aim at capturing the attention of shoppers engaged in active discovery. Which is cool, if people already know your brand, are aware of your current offers, and generally understand your brand promise or core value proposition. (In this context we’re talking about the buyer’s activities during the earlier phases of the marketing funnel.)

But what do marketers do if people are unaware of or unfamiliar with your brand? Or if you’re confronting damaging misperceptions about your product’s positioning, core benefits, price-to-value equation, etc.? Search alone is not enough.

Quick Explanation of Terms: Online Context

Active discovery

A buyer engages in active discovery when using Google or Bing to search for something in particular, such as which stores are offering a specific brand of fashion jeans at the best price. From the marketer’s standpoint this is the realm of search marketing. ‘Nuff said: there are a bazillion web resources on this subject.

Passive Discovery

Passive discovery occurs when the buyer didn’t know she was looking but found out about your brand (or offer) while visiting a web site and noticing your ad, seeing your message presented in the context of other search results, stumbling upon it while researching the category as a whole, etc.

The challenge for marketers is how best to leverage passive discovery in order to influence the buyer’s perceptions or emotional state as he moves through the purchasing process.

For B2B marketers Steve Woods (the author of the post I’m referencing) writes,

Passive messages are messages that would not be actively sought by potential buyers, such as messages that alter preconceived notions of reliability, applicability of a solution to a certain industry, and perceptions of product usability, service quality, or price point.

Woods says that marketers planning their messaging architecture need to think about how/when buyers are likely to encounter your messages, so you can anticipate and then create opportunities to benefit from passive as well as active discovery. He highly recommends the storytelling format as the mode most likely to be noticed and recalled.

So What’s the Answer?

Advertising?

Traditionally consumer marketers have resorted to various forms of advertising as “the way” to get in front of people when they’re not looking, but to do so in a way that would be memorable (and hopefully motivational). Once upon a time that kind of mass marketing worked … at least, better than its alternatives. These days, old-fashioned, out-of-context, interruption-based advertising is not an effective solution for capturing people’s attention when they’re not actively looking.

That is, it’s not the solution if you’re being held accountable to measured returns on marketing investment. Instead you’ve got to figure out how to make those messages available to the right people, at the right time, and in the right context. And despite all the advances in online display advertising over the past decade, we’re still in the early days of what’s possible when it comes to marketing effectiveness and ROI. [Disclosure: one of my clients is working on ways to meet the needs of under-served marketers who want to include more intelligent forms of online advertising in their marketing mix, especially when challenged by budgets that are too small to appeal to digital agencies.]

Word of Mouth?

Word-of-mouth is probably most effective in the context of active discovery, when you (as shopper) ask your friend what she thinks about her new Prius, or the nail salon that’s just opened up down the road.

All the wizards practicing social media marketing have lots to say on the subject of how to influence the people most likely to be influential when it comes to online word-of-mouth, so I won’t add to their wisdom here.

I do think the jury is still out when it comes to making social influencer marketing scalable and sustainable in the face of hard-to-prove concrete ROI. If the downturn continues,  hard-nosed bean counters are going to make it difficult for companies to staff up so they can operationalize social market-engagement models.  I think social has lots of promise, but it’s in its infancy when it comes to practicing this as a discipline that can be managed appropriately so it has a lasting effect on customer engagement and retention.

Other Sources

At the conceptual level there are some intriguing possibilities in Martin Lindstrom’s book Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. He spent several years and millions of dollars researching how the brain responds to advertising, product placements, and various communication techniques (such as symbols, stories, etc.). His findings are summarized in Buyology.

His application of neuroscience to communication effectiveness suggests some very interesting ideas, but taken too far, could also be scary…

Based on Lindstrom’s research Steve Woods’ recommendation that passive messages should be designed for transmission within stories is a good one.

Lessons from Apple & Evangelism

Lindstrom notes that communications techniques practiced by most established religions and cults are also highly effective when it comes to stimulating the brain to pay attention to or remember messages about brands and products. (And yes, those of us who have formerly worked for Apple’s marketing department are well aware of this…)

Here are the cross-denominational pillars of “marketing” as practiced by the world’s leading religions, according to Lindstrom in Buyology:

• A sense of belonging
• A clear vision
• Power over enemies
• Sensory appeal
• Storytelling
• Grandeur
• Evangelism
• Symbols
• Mystery
• Rituals

Just think about the launch of the iPad, as a case in point… It’s clear to me that these techniques are being deployed by Apple’s hype machine…

I’ve always loved David Armano’s thoughtful irreverence, his clear infographics, and the ways he helps us think about or reframe core issues in the worlds of marketing, media, community and communications. After stumbling across his wry “wheel of marketing misfortune,” for a recent presentation to a Chicago AMA event, I just had to share it here.  It made my day.

Looks like we’ve moved from “shiny object syndrome” to “social media goldrush,” if this gizmo is to be believed.

Armano presents some interesting frameworks and concepts, including a more holistic approach to guiding social media initiatives across the core disciplines of a business, rather than isolate them within yet another marketing silo. Thanks to Slideshare, here is David Armano’s latest thinking on social media from a “common sense” perspective:

Lately I’ve been struck by the messy, unintended consequences of the wrenching changes that the practice of marketing is going through. One such consequence is how hard it has become to get a big picture view of what’s going on in the marketplace, where your best opportunities might lie — whatever market your business or brand happens to serve.

We’re blessed with many choices, “bright shiny toys” to help us engage with customers, track and analyze online behaviors, tune up our revenue engines, tweak keyword strategies, monitor brand sentiment, listen in on customer conversations, optimize display advertising so it resonates with the best audiences. Etc., etc.

We’re inundated with analytics and data – but we’re confused by all the disparate piece parts, challenged by the techno-priests who pull the levers of the new magic black boxes. Each would have us believe that their black box is the one most important for market foresight or customer understanding. How do we make sense of all these complicated silos of marketing technology that compete for our time, resources and priorities, but were never designed to interoperate? Where are the people who can look across all these silos and help us develop actionable insights and programs from an integrated perspective? Where are the sense makers?

We’ve hollowed out the agencies, their top-notch intellectual talent is leaving for boutique firms. The economic downturn has savaged marketing budgets, and forced many talented, experienced people into unemployment or under-employment. We’re left with technocrats and specialists, people with deep but narrow insights. It’s hard to find people who can discern the patterns that cut across tactical silos and unrelated data streams, the golden opportunities to achieve lasting benefits for the business and its customers.

With all the “bright shiny new toys” that marketers and agencies now have our disposal, it’s all too easy to get lost in the weeds, and lose sight of what’s really important. Acquiring the right customers, engaging them in whatever ways are meaningful to them, and retaining them for as long as the relationship is profitable and beneficial to both parties. That’s what it’s all about.

Lately I’ve been struck by how we marketers may be losing our way, overlooking our core mission. Preoccupied with wrenching changes in how we launch products, retool the marketing mix, and engage influencers and stakeholders, it’s easy to overlook our core mission: understanding customers. How we apply what we understand about customers is what drives the marketing (and sales) engine.

Although we may be landing new projects based on the latest new thing, like social media or yesterday’s Web 2.0, that’s not the point. Here’s the deal:

The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer

If you believe Peter Drucker’s maxim, surely you accept its corollary: the role of marketing is understanding what it takes to create and keep customers.

Our quest for understanding should encompass the entire lifecycle of customer engagement. We need to listen to and learn about customers, putting ourselves in their shoes at every step along the way. Listen, and then respond appropriately. The question is, how do we do that without falling back into company- or product-centric habits and biases.

Where Do We Start?

These days, it’s hard to know which methods or technologies offer the most effective, actionable, timely, accurate and affordable ways to capture, share and refine customer insights so they lead to understanding. All the hype around social media may cloud the issue, and get us focused prematurely on platforms or technologies before we understand the reasons why. (What people call the lure of the “shiny new object.”)

What’s a marketer to do?

Should we mine twitter streams or troll the blogosphere? Subscribe to a “listening platform” so we can listen in on customer conversations wherever they occur online? Develop and manage a private online community? Outsource community management to a specialist firm? Hire ethnographers to observe customers where they work, play or go about the business of their daily lives? Run some focus groups? Send out an online survey? Do some phone interviews? Get some insights from an online consumer or executive panel? Buy some reports from Forrester or Gartner? Run some web analytics reports?

There’s no easy answer to these questions, given the siloed nature of marketing services, the fragmentation across market research and analytics providers. It’s hard to find objective advisors with a broad perspective across the full spectrum of customer insight sources, from the tried-and-true to the new online options. It’s all too likely that whoever you consult will tell you that their way, their proprietary methods, or their technology/service is the best.

Here’s a good starting point, a wise reminder from a research maven’s blog:

The purpose of market research is to understand people so we can answer business questions.

— Paraphrased from Steve August’s blog post

Step 1: Define Your Questions

So, start with your questions. What is it your business needs to understand? What do you need to do as a result? What can you afford (or afford not) to do? Given that as your business context, then start asking the marketing questions that will lead to understanding.

How customers buy (or make buying decisions)? Why do they buy? When do they buy? Where do they buy? What motivates them to choose your brand over others (or vice versa)? Where do they look for information or help?

How do customers segment, based on their particular usage occasions for your product? What causes them to stop using your product, or to use it less frequently? What other ways could they get this job done?

What do they think about you? What are they telling their friends about you? Who is influencing their thinking, or setting constraints on how they go about satisfying their needs? Whose opinions do they trust?

How else could you satisfy their needs? Do they have latent needs that you are uniquely equipped to satisfy?

Etc., etc.

How much are you willing to invest to get answers to these questions?

Step 2: Define and Prioritize Your Objectives

Define the questions that will have the most impact on your business. Eliminate those that can’t be linked to actions or decisions you might take in the future. While the answers to some questions might be nice to know, if you can’t identify how they will guide future business decisions, you probably can’t afford to waste money getting answers you can’t use.

Setting your objectives is a key step in any marketing project; smart marketers set objectives that are measurable. As a best practice, you should apply the SMART framework to articulate your objectives — and get consensus from your key stakeholders (and budget approvers) that these are the most important objectives and metrics.

Step 3: Do Your Homework or Consult an Advisor

Before getting caught up in the courtship dance with a technology or specialty research provider, make sure you’ve framed your business goals and marketing objectives; defined how you plan to apply the customer understanding you’ll obtain as a result.

Then assess your options for discovering or capturing customer insights, and how effective each option is for its intended purpose.

Be mindful of the implications from cognitive science about how people think, the low correlations between consumers’ stated intentions and actual behaviors — the gap between the conscious mind and what drives behavior. Narrow your list to the research methods (including listening) that are most likely to deliver the kinds of actionable insights you seek.

If you’re feeling over-whelmed by all these considerations, you might want to engage an advisor to help you think through your best course of action.

Be aware that the market research industry itself is in flux, undergoing transformation, so it may be difficult to find well-informed and objective advisors who can advise you across the full spectrum of options. If you consult a technology or service provider for guidance, watch out for unintended biases. As Abraham Maslow said,

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

During today’s presentation to the Seattle Social Media Club, Sean O’Driscoll, community builder and influencer marketing expert, revealed how he answers the inevitable questions about the ROI on social media and influencer marketing programs.

He held up a phone and rhetorically asked, “How do you measure the ROI on your telephones?” Translation: it’s the conversations that count — assuming you listen and have scalable strategies for responding. He then went on to share his planning and engagement frameworks for strategizing and then operationalizing social media initiatives.

Based on his many years running influencer and MVP programs at Microsoft, Sean suggests that questions about proving the ROI on social media marketing often signal resistance to change. Rather than get into a debate on social ROI, he advocates defining business objectives with metrics linked to desired sustainable results, rather than tactical KPIs like the volume of tweets or fan reach.

The whole point of engaging in influencer marketing and conversations with your market is to learn where, how and why to transform key business functions, processes, products, etc., in order to better meet your customers’ needs. And to understand how to articulate and deliver on brand promises that will attract and keep your customers, and motivate them to enlist other customers — a virtuous cycle of brand advocacy.

Note: Sean O’Driscoll is CEO and co-founder of Ant’s Eye View, a newly formed Seattle area strategy and social consultancy.

Social media experts like Shiv Singh recommend that you designate one or more people to serve as your organization’s social media voice. To qualify as a “SIM voice” the individual should be a real person, an online conversationalist who has left digital footprints across the social Web and whose profile is easy to find across the relevant social platforms. This person has intrinsic authority and credibility among people within your industry or consumer base.

The challenge with this recommendation is that such people are in short supply and high demand. If you’re lucky enough to employ people with authentic SIM voices, you’re vulnerable to poaching if you can’t motivate them to stay with your organization. One of my clients has already lost 3 SIM voices this year to other opportunities.

If you think about it, the conflict is obvious: the more authentic and influential people with SIM voices are, the more visible they are across the social Web — or at least within the industry niche that matters to your firm. As their authority builds, as their audience grows, so too do their allure and their personal brand power.

This makes them easy to find and increasingly attractive to potential employers who want a fast track to a credible social media presence. Agencies advise clients to put people with social media cred into SIM voice roles. When enterprises lack influential bloggers or SIM voices within their staff, they’ll go hunting. Your firm could be vulnerable, especially if your HR policies don’t take into account today’s talent shortage within the social media realm. (I suspect this is what happened to my client.)

Root Causes

Conflict looms because quarterly earnings pressure drives many enterprises to pursue short-term cost-cutting at the expense of employee loyalty or motivation. Lay-offs abound. Employees feel over-burdened and under-appreciated. In private conversations many of my friends who work for large enterprises with household brands tell me they are miserable at work, and would jump at the chance at another job if the right opportunity presented itself.

Employers treat employees as if they were fungible or captive labor: easy to replace at a moment’s notice with someone else in the talent pool. As a consequence only 20% of the American workforce is passionate about their work, according to a 2009 study by Deloitte’s Center for the Edge. Deloitte reports that talented workers want not just monetary benefits but also non-monetary rewards such as learning opportunities and fruitful relationships:

Talent, particularly the creative and passionate talent, is attracted to firms that are rich in relationships, generate knowledge flows, and that provide tools and platforms to help talent to grow and achieve their fullest potential.

And meanwhile no one agrees on how to measure social media ROI. This can aggravate the manager’s challenge when trying to protect people in SIM voice roles from the latest round of cost-cutting by the beancounters.

As we see below, people with SIM voices are not fungible.

Attributes of a “SIM Voice”

According to Shiv Singh, author of Social Media Marketing for Dummies, people who can serve as your company’s SIM voice have the following characteristics:

• A real person within your company who pro-actively reaches out to customers or partners – someone with a customer service mentality
• An authentic, real person who is traceable and findable via Google or Bing
• Maintains an active presence on the social media platforms and across the social networks that matter to your industry or consumers
• Someone who is engaging and conversational – interesting to people who read this person’s blogs or follow her tweets
• Unique and recognizable
• Savvy about the norms and rules of engagement across the various social media platforms, particularly those that are most frequented by or compelling to your customers

But here’s the hidden threat to organizations that’s inherent within the power of personal branding (source: Social Media Marketing for Dummies):

In contrast to a brand voice, this SIM person’s voice must be unique to him and not unique to the company. This is incredibly important for the trust to develop. Otherwise, the whole effort will be a waste of time. Furthermore, this voice should be irreplaceable. When the person goes on vacation, the voice cannot continue to participate and be responsive to customer inquiries. Someone else has to take over and introduce herself first.

Implications for Your Firm

The moral of this story is, if you plan to invest in a stable of SIM voices, make sure your policies and practices motivate talented people to keep working for your organization. If your retention practices fail, your inability to retain such people will become visible and will lead to uncomfortable questions if you lose too many of these assets over time.

One of the best examples of a thriving online professional community is I Love Typography. Almost 50,000 people subscribe to its RSS feeds. There are many voices: multiple authors and lots of people who care enough to respond. It feels vibrant and live. People share experiences and point to great examples of typography in use.

It’s beautifully designed — a wonderful exemplar of what can be achieved with design-friendly tools like WordPress when put in the hands of a talented web designer.

But what makes this such a vibrant community? What lessons can we take away from this example and apply elsewhere?

This blog exhibits the qualities required to keep online communities alive and thriving:

• Shared effort
• Shared purpose
• Shared identity – sense of belonging
• Organic
• Freedom

[Thanks to thought leader Larry Keeley, innovation strategist at The Doblin Group, for articulating these characteristics of community in the 1990s — way ahead of his time, as always.]

Shared Effort

There are multiple voices in this typography community, mostly those of designers and practitioners — people who love type and use it as a key component of well-designed communications.

The blog posts attract dozens of comments. People care; you feel their passion in what they write.

Larry Keeley wrote that attributes of shared effort in building a community include things like:

• A sense of obligation or responsibility on the part of the members
• Access, the ability to participate
• Opportunities for collaboration
• A sense that it matters, that the community has consequence

Shared Purpose

People in the community understand and buy into its mission, its raison d’être; they have a shared vision for what it is, what it could become, and where it’s heading. They work together to make progress toward a common goal.

Shared Identity

People in the community have shared histories or shared experiences in the workplace, in their educational or vocational backgrounds. They may have worked at the same company or attended the same school, or have the same professional credentials. (Just think of all those groups that are springing up within the LinkedIn environment.)

Members feel a sense of belonging, feel “at home,” welcomed – free to speak and act in ways that are authentic to who they really are.

In the case of designers they’ve probably been taught similar ways of “seeing” or imagining, learned common approaches to problem solving.

Members often have shared values.

The community exerts a magnetic attraction (may grow virally), and pulls new like-minded people into its gravitational force field. Who in turn attract others.

Organic

What happens in the community is not imposed top-down, by some centralized authority. Instead membership is distributed, effort and contributions are decentralized. Effort (and hopefully rewards or benefits) are balanced among all the participants. People are interdependent.

The opposite to this is what can happen within volunteer organizations when effort is not equally distributed, and a small core team of contributors valiantly perform the work of the entire community. Eventually they give up, tired and unappreciated, and the community withers away…

Freedom

Members or visitors are free to come and go. Choices are offered: what to do, what to read or see, where to go. Rights are protected; people understand the rules of engagement, and within that clarity understand their freedom to act or speak out.

It feels empowering to members.

The notion of freedom as a required attribute does not imply that communities can’t put up walls or boundaries (like requiring registration or subscription fees). But it does mean that there needs to be freedom of movement, freedom of speech and choices offered once inside the walls of the community.

What Happens When Attributes Are Lacking

When an online venue lacks these ingredients, it’s not a true community.

Instead it’s a portal or a media outlet or some other hybrid example whose “oxygen” is being fueled by the sponsor… In that case the so-called community will disappear once the sponsor ceases to provide what’s necessary to keep it going.

This is why so many brand-centric or vendor-sponsored “communities” are at risk if they don’t pass the “shared effort” and “shared sense of purpose” tests…