Elevating community engagement: Insights from Bill Johnston

“Markets are conversations” or so the Cluetrain Manifesto reminded us way back in 1999.

With instant global connectivity, people are now more informed and often faster than most companies can move. Talking at your market‌ — ‌with marketing brochures and mission statements and cold-call campaigns‌ — ‌is no longer effective. Instead, you have to think about co-creating value with customers and engaging them in conversations.

Communities for value co-creation

Community engagement allow organizations to do just that. It’s no surprise that we’ve seen a growth in marketing strategies that focus on creating a passionate fan base to engage in meaningful relationships.

But community is much more than just setting up a forum where people can interact. They’re far-reaching and have many touchpoints within an organization. Good community management recognizes the ecosystem in which it operates, and that ecosystem is often complex. And when nurtured, communities can offer valuable insights, drive innovation, and amplify brand advocacy, greatly benefiting your organization.

Mapping your community ecosystem

So how can we better approach and understand complex community ecosystems better? Luckily, our friend and community expert, Bill Johnston, has developed a template to do just that.

His community ecosystem diagram allows your company to jointly map out the various parts of your community program. Having it in a visual form helps you not only see all of the moving parts at once. It also helps you engage in the right conversations and make the right decisions needed to maximize community effectiveness.

“Your community doesn't live in one place; it doesn't exclusively live on your site. It lives kind of anywhere and everywhere. And this [template] allows you to get to an educated point of view as to where it is and where you should be investing.” - Bill Johnston

Bill’s approach makes use of a bull’s-eye diagram of concentric circles, much like our What’s on Your Radar template. The circles in his method show importance:

The inner circle are critical pieces of your community program
The middle circle are for important aspects
The outer circle is for factors to consider but are least important, or emerging aspects

Then, you need to consider factors and players from four different categories, each occupying a quadrant of the diagram.

Social media: What are the social media channels that touch your community?
Communities and groups: What existing groups does your community overlap with?
Digital media: What newsletters, podcasts, blogs, etc touch your community?
Product: How might community show up in your product?

Prioritize the customer

Using icons and labels in Bill’s template, you can then drag over the elements in each of the four categories and prioritize them. When you zoom in, you start to see the big picture and uncover connections and relationships between all of the aspects of your community ecosystem.

The customer stands at the center of the diagram, reminding teams of what’s most important. Put customer needs first to build trust, as well as the excitement and engagement needed for communities to thrive.

Test and iterate

Bill recommends creating a hypothesis for your community’s ecosystem. For example, you might believe that TikTok could be very relevant to your community engagement growth. If you then test that hypothesis, you may find evidence that confirms your belief or goes against it.

As a breathing, living artifact, the Community Ecosystem Map can be updated as you learn more. Check out the template in Mural, which is where Bill gets his work done: