When we discover new tools, new ideas, and new people, our first inclination is to notice the differences and look for patterns there. We notice the people who dress differently from us, but the same as each other and try to figure out what they have in common. That’s how we learn the difference between all of the shades of blue and green, it’s called constructivism. It’s about “constructing” our understanding of the world.

Each of us generates our own “rules” and “mental models,” which we use to make sense of our experiences. Learning, therefore, is simply the process of adjusting our mental models to accommodate new experiences. –Constructivism

We do it well as a child, because our brains are wired to be constantly constructing and reconstructing. Once we’ve accumulated a database of knowledge, though, we’re not as good. Too often we construct new models without reflecting on the models and experiences that already serve us.

Yet if we want to build on concrete and know what we know deeply, we can’t forget what we already know.

The 3 Most Compelling Strategies for Starting a Community

Recently I’ve stepped alongside my dad’s story to look at it from the outside as a business case. In doing that I’ve come to realize that everyone — even me — has been focusing on what’s different between the online and offline cultures. Yet, to build community, it’s what’s the same that counts.

Last Friday at SOBCon, I suggested that three strategies are important to start a community that will grow. And they’re all things I learned by looking at how my dad grew his business.

1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

   The little man behind the curtain didn’t fix Dorothy’s problem, but it wasn’t until the little man behind came out and talked to Dorothy that she started going in the right direction. A relationship happened.

   Solutions are what fuels the search engines. They’re what brings customers and keeps them. Solutions focus us and give us purpose. It used to be location, location, location, if you wanted to be found. Now it’s solution, solution, solution.

   The person who will build a thriving community online is the one who can do that offline too.

2. Let your business have 27 surrogate parents.
   I used to say there were 27 people who thought they were my surrogate parents. When I was little, they would point to their photos on the wall in his saloon — next to mine and my brothers’ photos — and they’d tell me the stories of and the roles they played in events that happened in my father’s saloon. The walls were flickr in 3-D.

   Every dance recital and graduation, my dad would buy something like 27 tickets. After the event, those friends would meet my family at the saloon and we’d all walk over to the best restaurant in town.

   After dinner, my dad would write the name of every person who worked at the restaurant on a pad of paper and then he’s put a number by each one. When he paid, the bill he tipped all of them.

   When I got older I asked him why he did that. It had to be expensive to be so generous every time I got an A on my report card. He said, “Babydoll, they work hard. I want to acknowledge that. I’m their customer now. Some will tell their families. Some won’t. At 10pm when the restaurant closes a few will walk back over to the saloon to say “thank you” and buy a drink. That’s good too.”

   Never forget your core fans. Make them your heroes and let them see the hero in you.

3. Raise a barn, don’t build a coliseum. Start small.

   Have you heard the story of WordPress?

   It started when Matt Mullenweg asked a simple question about a broken and neglected journaling system. He said something like, “I think we can do better than this. Does anyone want to help?”

   WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

   Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community.

   The Word Press community has become hundreds people, hundreds of WordCamps where they meet yearly, thousands of lines of code that runs tens of millions of blogs. The enterprise version of WordPress serves 21 Popular Brands and every US government agency except the TSA.

   The community that helps build WordPress learns by doing that, feels ownership, and protects what they’ve built.

   If you let them build it, bring their friends pitch in.

Starting a community is as easy as 1, 2, 3 — Choose the compelling strategies and the community will feel they belong. All three add up to investing in the people you want to serve. And as Steve Farber says,

Do what you love in service to the people who love what you do.

What attracts you to a community?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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