Chapter 1
Why Community Is the New Competitive Advantage

What does it actually mean for a business to build community? It's such a broad term that's used in so many different ways, it's always difficult to nail down. In every conversation I have with a company asking for advice on their community strategy, I always kick off by asking, "Why are you investing in community?" The majority of the time, this is the first time anyone at the company has had to articulate an answer to that question.

So we're going to start there. In this chapter, I'm going to give you some working definitions of community, we'll talk about the history of businesses investing in community, and I'll help you understand why it's becoming such a prominent part of the conversation today. I'll also share some big-picture concepts that explain why community is such a powerful force for businesses. We're starting high-level, and will get more and more specific as we move through the book.

Let's start off with some history.

A Customer Community Is Born

Business has been moving in the direction of community for a long time now. In fact, if you go looking for the very first time a business built a community team, you'd have to go back to the early days of the internet.

Apple pioneered a new wave of computing. But did you know it was also the very first company to have a community team and build a customer community program?

There weren't many places for people to talk to each other online when Ellen Petry Leanse joined the company in 1981 as a communications specialist, just five years after the company was founded. In 1985, after the Mac launched, Apple was dealing with frustration at the hands of its users - especially those who had committed to the Apple II in the years before the Mac. As the company pivoted toward the Mac in 1984, they felt abandoned, and most of the feedback received from customers came in the form of printed letters mailed to their office.

Leanse would respond to these letters directly and started noticing that a lot of the letters had a code on them. When she asked the customers about the codes, she learned that they were access codes for BBS groups (bulletin board systems). Unbeknownst to Apple, their customers were already gathering online on one of the earliest forms of internet forums, and talking about their products.

Leanse saw an opportunity. She advocated - against resistance, since "going online" was uncharted territory for any tech enterprise at that time - for establishing their own BBS node and sharing information from Apple directly with its user communities. Suddenly they were connected with a global community of customers.

It was an uphill battle for Leanse. If you think engaging in online communities is unfamiliar territory for businesses today, you can imagine what it felt like back then. Participating in communities with customers just wasn't something businesses did. Even Apple, who's well known for breaking the mold, was hesitant, largely viewing users as a "cost," not a benefit.

Ellen fought for making a real investment in community. She would spend a lot of time talking to customers, gathering their feedback, and sharing it internally. After a lot of advocacy, she found a believer in Apple's CEO, John Sculley, who backed taking the voice of users seriously. With his support, the "Apple User Group Connection" was born, led by Leanse. "I was fortunate enough to be chosen to make this connection, and I couldn't have done it alone - but I did fight for it alone", said Leanse. "no one knew anything about it until after I started sharing with users and harnessing the power of their input."

The AUGC was a hit, bringing together Apple users from around the world and providing a channel for their voice to be heard. Sculley would host digital discussions in the user groups, sharing updates with users and listening to their feedback. It opened up the curtains in a way businesses just didn't do at that time, and it helped Apple turn the corner on improving customer sentiment.

"We felt it start to humanize the company at a time when technology was all about the machine," says Leanse.

It was a revolutionary mentality for a business to adopt at the time, and a preview of what was to come.

The Rise of Community-Driven Business

Apple was early to identify an important trend that would accelerate over the next few decades: the growing power of the customer.

Back when customers couldn't talk to each other or research products (unless they were more technical and could use tools like BBS groups), companies didn't have to prioritize customer support. If customers had a bad experience, they wouldn't be able to tell too many other people about it.

That all changed when customers could suddenly talk to each other online using social networks. They could now share reviews of products, "word of mouth" was accelerated, and positive or negative sentiment could spread like wildfire.

This led to the huge customer service trend, led by companies like Zappos and Amazon. In his book Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh recalled the radical perspective they had on growing the business. "Our philosophy [was] to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth."1

This was unheard of at the time, and it worked! Zappos would grow to be the internet's largest shoe retailer, and it sparked a revolution in how businesses would look at customers. Putting the customer first became a competitive advantage.

This trend grew as social networks continued to give consumers more power and access. Companies started hiring full content and social media teams to build trust and to connect more personally with customers. "Inbound marketing" and "customer success" was born to proactively invest in helping customers succeed. Businesses started making it a priority to help customers more successfully use their products, improve their skills, and grow in their careers, knowing that a more successful customer is a more loyal customer.

But it was still very much one-to-one and "one-to-many" communication. It would be a company rep talking to a customer directly, or creating content that would be distributed to a large audience. What most companies were failing to do, save for a few exceptions like Apple, was create spaces for "many-to-many" communication. With one-to-one, you're limited by how many people you can form deep trust and connection with. With one-to-many communication, you can reach more people, but will lack depth. With many-to-many communication, there is no limit.

That's why we're now seeing customer support and content marketing give way to a new era of customer relationships: the customer community.

This next phase is all about helping customers and other stakeholders connect to each other. Companies are setting themselves apart by tapping into the collective energy, knowledge, and contributions of your most passionate customers, fans, and partners. When people feel like they're a part of a community it becomes their home. They don't want to leave. And they'll step up to contribute and grow the community in ways you can't imagine.

There are few better examples of companies who have tapped into the power of community than Salesforce. Erica Kuhl spent the majority of her 17 years at Salesforce building the community program from the ground up. Kuhl once described herself to me as a "bulldog" who would not give up on something she believed in. She certainly didn't when it came to community. Much like Ellen Leanse at Apple, the company didn't "get it," and she fought a long, uphill battle to get leadership to understand what it meant to build community and why it was such a big opportunity. Lucky for Salesforce, they trusted her and gave her a chance to prove it.

She knew that the only true way to get buy-in was with data, and she made it a priority to show how community could impact the bottom line. Whenever she took on a new community project, she made sure it would be something she could measure, and tie back to ROI.

Over the years she was able to show how community reduced support costs, increased product adoption, and increased customer spend and retention. She would become Salesforce's first VP of Community and community would get woven into the fabric of every product at Salesforce. There are now over 3,000,000 members in the Salesforce Trailblazer community supporting and educating each other in how to better use the product and grow in their careers. Recent research conducted by the company showed that 82 percent of its customers found that the community increased the ROI of their investment in Salesforce's tools, and 93 percent said that it helped them find new products and tools they could use in the Salesforce product suite.

Every day, we're seeing more examples of companies driving incredible results by building community. One recent study showed that over half of the Fortune Global 50 and the 50 highest-valued startups  in the world are investing in community programs.2

Newer companies that have risen in the community-driven business era have...