Customer Communities

6Law 2: You Have to Own the Platform: Engage Your Customers Beyond Borrowed Ground

By Kenneth Refsgaard and Nadia Nicolai

As discussed in the previous chapter, community can mean many things. From simply connecting with a handful of people in a video call to organizing meetups and various other approaches, we can connect with others online. Early community-building is often based on taking steps with small groups and tapping into existing communities. These types of efforts are a great place to start and will remain relevant at every stage of maturity of your community strategy. With these efforts, you will typically engage with community members on “borrowed ground”—in other words, in a setting or on a platform you don't own. An example would be engaging with customers on a social media platform like LinkedIn or in an existing Slack, Discord, or Reddit community.

Inevitably, however, the time will come when you are ready to build and nurture your own space for customer engagement. This can include offline customer events, like Gainsight's annual Pulse conference (which we will touch on in more detail in Law 7). This book, however, will focus on building communities at scale in an “owned” online environment. In this chapter, we will explain what this means to us and why we believe this is the most effective long-term approach when creating a community for your business.

But first let's walk through the most common options that the companies we work with typically consider as ...