Noticing what your community is already telling you
This is probably the most important thing you can do at the start of any community endeavour. Here's how to do it...
This week, Substack launched Notes, a new way for writers and readers to share ideas. It’s bloody brilliant and I hope you’ll check it out:
I had the privilege of having a ringside seat at launch. Something I’ve loved throughout my career is seeing great new products and ideas take flight. The Substack app, Instagram Direct, Instagram Stories; the Guardian’s open news campaign and the launch of Guardian Local, of which I was a key part; and the app I helped launch in 2020, Beams.
One of the best tasks a marketing or community person can do on launch day is what marketeers call social listening. For those in the content space, this usually involves your eyes and your mind, not your ears. But the point is you are spending time looking, reading, watching and observing what your community is doing in a space.
The word I think best describes this activity is noticing. I’d recommend assigning at least one full person to noticing on launch day, and beyond, and that’s whether it’s a large scale product launch, or a new community campaign. There are some very subtle nuances to noticing which I want to uncover in this post. We’ll be breaking it down into three key areas to observe. But first, let’s look at what noticing actually is, and why it’s probably the most important thing you can do at the start of any community endeavour, new venture, app or feature launch, or business idea.
Where most companies go wrong
Have you ever seen your local pizza joint ask for you to ‘send in your stories.’ Or seen a terrible hashtag used in a tv ad campaign to encourage participation. These half-hearted campaigns smack of a lack of understanding, and listening, to your community. They probably hadn’t noticed that people usually never share #PizzaHutStories, unless the prompt is unusually good. A small amount of research, data and noticing can be the differentiation between a campaign which actually does more damage than good, and a world-class community-first storytelling.
When I worked at Condé Nast for as head of social strategy for Vogue International, I saw quickly in the data that cover reveals were one of the biggest social moments each month, for every Vogue. But when I joined these were largely quite static affairs. Each Vogue would share the cover image, often poorly cropped for social, on their feed. End of. I wanted to change this and knew we were missing a more community-driven way to tell the story of each cover—a key way we could engage younger audiences (part of my remit at the time), and truly dominate a story Vogue should own.
So when Edward Enninful released his first cover for British Vogue after taking over as Editor-in-chief, a beautiful spread with the model Adua Aboah, I noticed something interesting happening in a pocket community on social media.
I happened to follow a few UK illustrator accounts from my earlier Instagram reporter days, and saw they were sharing their illustrated remakes of the cover. I tapped through to look at the hashtag #newvogue, which the British Vogue team had been promoting, and found many more—collages, line drawings, watercolour recreations. I didn’t take long to stumble across 15 or more brilliant recreations of the cover. I quickly sent them over to the British Vogue team.
It was a huge success: a big boost to the illustrators, who were tagged in the posts. But also did something great for the new era of British Vogue—it showed they were listening, and cared about their talented community members. It was a way not only to identify and connect with their community, but through tagging each creator, a way also for the community to connect them to each other, and thus grow. This is what the Get Together crew call building with. Though it may seem like a small gesture this was a great brand moment for British Vogue to remain connected and listening. After that first month, British Vogue continued a series for resharing illustrations of their monthly covers.
It was a way not only to identify and connect with their community, but through tagging each creator, a way also for the community to connect them to each other, and thus grow.
Why is social listening important? Listening allows us to get to know the new community we want to engage with. It’s the next step from “going down the rabbit hole.” It generates social capital—a sort of brand goodwill which you can’t easily replicate or destroy. Essentially it does the thing we are exploring in this newsletter: building strong, deep and loyal global communities.