What is Community Strategy?

Everyone’s talking about community right now! Even the founder of Twitch, Justin Kan.

In a recent video on TikTok, Twitch founder Justin Kan said that community strategy is just as important as product strategy in 2022. While I fully agree with him there, his definition of community strategy is confusing at best and harmful at worst. He states that community is about a founder creating a brand around their personality and then launching a Discord so they can talk to people.

This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to community building, and—not only that—but it’s dangerous to think about cults of personality as communities.

So let’s talk about what a healthy and non-harmful strategy should contain.

First, let's define the word strategy. Strategy is a set of guiding principles that help you make decisions. It should help you personally make decisions and help your team make decisions without your direct involvement. If you're a CEO or a leader, strategy allows you to distribute responsibility and trust that people have a framework for making really good decisions.

Your strategy should help distinguish you in a noisy marketplace and help you determine what distinct activities you're going to pursue as an organization.

The term strategy has a long history in the business context, and back in 1996, Michael E. Porter wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review that set out what it means. Why? Because, like the term community today, it was often being mistaken for something it wasn’t. In this case, strategy was being mistaken for operations.

Now, this isn't the final word on strategy. Michael D. Watkins wrote an article in 2007 expanding upon Porter’s definition and bringing it into more alignment with how we see strategy today. Even still, that isn’t the final word. There are many schools of thought around what strategy is and which is best—including one of my favorites, Emergent Strategy.

Second, we must define community. A community is a set of people who share mutual concern for one another. In the context of a brand community, that community is simply stewarded by a brand. I define it even more specifically at this link because the term is so misunderstood.

To understand what community strategy is, then, we put ‘em together.

Community strategy is a set of guiding principles that helps you decide how you will build a group of people who share mutual concern for one another.

Not as easy as launching a Discord around your personality, is it? Because that’s not strategic at all.

Community strategy helps you understand the activities, content, and programs you should be organizing. When you create an intentional community strategy, you're going to create values-based relational bonds, and it's not going to be all about what you get out of it. It's going to be about what everyone gets out of it. It’s a system of mutual shared value and mutual shared concern.

If you don’t have a set of guiding principles for your community, what ends up happening is that the experience is really random and disjointed for your community members, which means that whatever you're trying to create with the community will be random and disjointed.

So while I agree with Justin Kan that community strategy is just as—if not more important than—product strategy in 2022, I disagree with the idea that you should create a community around your personality or who you are as a founder or creator. That is just plain dangerous.

Having a community strategy means creating something scalable and valuable to all involved. That means that you're helping participate in a regenerative future.

So make sure that you're operating with a clear set of guiding principles and—most of all—don't believe the bullshit.