Find your bind: The connecting glue of community stories
And how the concept of @sweden withstood every challenge
Hello friends and welcome back to another installment of Tell Their Stories. If you’re catching up, take a look at where we’re at in the TTS toolkit below. This week, we’re going back to the basics of community building through storytelling, looking at the purpose and binding factor (the WHY) which makes your stories sticky.
Before we begin, a quick note of thanks. I’ve had the joy of meeting TTS paying and founding members over the last month (hello Kate, Sof, and Emma!) and I’m so grateful for your support. Our conversations have sparked ideas for future posts in the TTS toolkit. So be sure to upgrade today to gain access to the upcoming chapters:
Recruiting: what to consider when hiring community roles
Metrics: how to measure your goals and showcase value to stakeholders
Case studies: The hidden consequences of upsetting your community
Let’s get into it!
The word ‘connected’ comes from the Latin words con—meaning ‘together’—and nectere—meaning ‘to bind’.
When people feel connected, they feel a sense of being bound together. Whether that be by their nationality, the platform they use, or something else. This connectedness is what we crave as humans. Being a facilitator to connect people to others, to create multiple strong authentic connections as a community, is the kernel of the stories we tell.
This post should help you look at the connecting factor of your community building project, and see how stories are the sticky glue which spread the connectedness.
Understanding what connects your unique community should help shape your goals and objectives for the desired end-point of your power user, as well as tactics and metrics (this is also the subject of a future post). This is all in a bid to find your binding factor — to identify the connecting glue of what you do, which will set you up for success.
Start with why
In Simon Sinek’s bestselling book Start With Why, he argues those who focus on their ‘why’ over their ‘what’ will be better set to inspire and find followers. For Sinek, ’why’ means your purpose, your cause, your belief. As he puts it: “Why do you get out of bed every morning and why should anyone care?” Sinek uses Apple as an example. For Sinek, Apple is a company which has seen greater success for focusing their messaging around their ‘why’. “Everything they do works to demonstrate their WHY, to challenge the status quo. Regardless of the products they make or industry in which they operate, it is always clear that Apple ‘thinks different.’”
One thing anyone who has worked at a tech company will tell you is that founders love to repeat their founding story (also often called an ‘Origin Story’).
The same went for me at Instagram. It was the story of how Instagram started in a small office in Dogpatch, San Francisco, and former co-founders Kevin and Mike loved telling it. How the first instagrammers came and knocked on their door to go out and take photos together, forming the first ever instameet. How it used to be called Burbn, after the founders’ love of whiskey. These small details might sound insidious to some. But we, the some 75-100 employees at the time, loved hearing them. They made up our origin story, which knitted us together, reignited passion in our work and sense of belonging. Helped us know a bit more about who we are. The story was told with so much of our WHY engraved in its narrative. It became the connecting factor for those working at the company and was part of our binding glue.
The same was true of Facebook (pre-Meta) too. Ask anyone who worked at the company in the first ten years to recall the mission statement of Facebook’s existence and they would often trill back with startling immediacy: “Making the world more open and connected.” All “newb” Facebook employees had its mission, their WHY, ringing through their ears after the first few weeks working at the company.
But many companies, small, medium and big businesses, are notoriously bad at having core and deep rooted missions.
The Guardian, for example, had a strong sense of their culture, their origins in Manchester, and values of what they stood for. But the mission kept changing during my tenure. One day it was about open journalism (2012’s Whole Picture campaign), the next about preserving independent investigative journalism. Giving a keynote at the GEN Summit in Athens in 2019, Editor-in-Chief Kath Viner had a more modern mission to offer: creating “meaningful journalism.” Often, if left to those who are fans or even employees, culture is developed by what others think about the company: ‘sandal wearing, quinoa-loving lefties,’ was one description I was told about the Guardian for example. Which is wildly off the mark. Many local newspapers I worked also never gave me or their readers a strong sense of their values or who they are.
Defining WHY you are trying to connect your community with will help shape the entire content plan and execution of your early steps in your storytelling project, and help you later when you might want to extend beyond your original design. Telling your members your origin story will never get old.
Now, more than ever, large-scale corporations are struggling to pin down their WHY after hundreds of years of existence. Often, smaller startups are quick to grow because they spent time deciding their WHY at the beginning, and were well-positioned in their market as a result.
Read more about defining your WHY from the folks at
for On Substack:Case study: Curators of Sweden (@sweden)
In 2011, a project team at the Swedish Institute created the @sweden Twitter account. For seven years, every week, a new Swede would takeover @sweden on Twitter, and tweet about whatever they wanted. The team behind it felt Sweden’s stories would best be told through the eyes of those who make Sweden Sweden.
The account was heralded as a completely new innovation at the time, championed for its incredibly powerful community-first concept. Later, more countries and places would follow its example such as @ireland and @peopleofleeds. But in 2011, no other country had handed over its official Twitter handle to its citizens.
The project won three awards during the time it was active. Wired called it “the last good thing on Twitter,” (in 2018! They weren’t wrong.)
Why was it so successful?