Community Building

If there's any kind of lesson in all this, it's mostly some advice I want to give myself.

The lesson is simply: speak up .

It's OK to slip into advocacy now and then, so long as you do it tastefully. If it sounds high- or heavy-handed — or anything like nagging — you're doing it wrong. Just explain why you care about a particular value. The goal... See more

look at how the word “ community ” itself has been warped in recent years into a cynical marketing cliché to rival “storyteller” — annexed as the torched rhetorical territory of people who live to “move product” above all else.

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people... See more

When a community is growing in a healthy way it can feel painfully slow. We’re so used to marketing funnels! At this point, I see two things happen 1) we abandon the community or 2) use our marketing chops to flood new members in. We abandon our trees or over seed our gardens!