In the place where I live there is a local community dedicated to offline meetups. Once a month, the organizers find several speakers willing to give a presentation about IT and a venue for the event. The community has a chat, but nobody actually uses it. All the org work is handled by the organizers with no help from volunteers. Except speakers and the organizers, everyone in the community is hundred percent passive. Although the group has the word “community” in its name, it is not a community. In fact, it is a group of talented organizers and their audiences. Let’s see why.
Community or audience
There is a huge difference between an audience and a community. By definition, an online community is a group of people connected by a shared goal, an interest or a purpose and communicating with each other. In other words, a community is about people who want to do something together, interact with each other and are interested in each other.
An audience, in turn, is a group of people interested in something or someone. The audience’s attention is always focused on one person, brand or something like that.
Community and audience solve different tasks
Users in a community interact with each other; it is always two-way communication. Community assumes collective action that usually leads to creation of value by the users themselves. The audience does not provide any means to facilitate the exchange of information between the people, the audience only consumes. If you work with an audience, your primary task is to create something that is interesting to the audience. If you work with a community, then your primary task is to activate the users and in every possible way help them create what is interesting to them and other community users.
Subscribers of Encyclopedia Britannica are its audience. Volunteers who write articles on Wikipedia are part of the community of encyclopedists.
Attributes that help to distinguish between a community and an audience
Almost any community should have the following attributes:
- A clear mission of the community that clearly explains why it exists.
- Specific unifying goals
- Most of the activities in the community should be carried out by the users themselves.
- Community organizers should only set the direction and then focus on supporting volunteers.
- Community users should actively communicate with each other.
One thing from the list leads to others. Most likely, if you miss something from the list, the rest is missing as well and you have an audience, not a community. The reverse is also true, if you want to move from an audience to a community, you need to make sure that all the attributes are present.
Both approaches work, but you must know with who you work
If the organizers of my local offline group stop working on the meetups, the group will halt immediately. On the other hand, communities like Stack Overflow can live without any help from the managing company for decades (although they will stagnate all this time).
In the case of the audience organizers make most decisions on their own and are completely responsible for running the show, the people are passive. Community users are active, know what they need and rarely silently agree with imposed decisions from the outside. They are used to participating in decision making. Working with the community and the audience needs to be done differently because they are different types of people.
You won’t run a marathon at the speed of a sprinter. Or will you?