Exploitation is never a feature

It’s Wednesday, October 18th, and today we’re talking about an insidious community trend and some direct alternatives.

First time reading? Sign up here.

Got some praise or feedback? Hit reply.

Exploitation is Never a Feature

There is a new kind of trust exploitation popping up in communities and I witnessed it firsthand this week.

We’ve all seen marketing and sales strategies that are just plain gross, yet they prevail because they work. When a tactic is delivering a clear ROI, there’s no real reason to examine it very closely.

I’ve noticed a handful of communities advertising one specific benefit to paid members. It’s always made me a bit uncomfortable, and having experienced it as a new member, I’m here to sound the alarm. So let’s talk about:

• What it is and why community founders are doing it

• The long-term damage being done

• Three alternatives that will net you the same results, but with much happier members

🚨 Incoming rant:

I recently had a community experience that royally ticked me off. While I normally don’t find rants useful, I am going to make an exception here, because it sets the stage well.

This community is a regional-based Facebook group for entrepreneurs. They were summarized as follows (group name removed for privacy):

Great.

The Facebook group does indeed have over 40k people. The first thing I noticed was that the majority of the posts were relatively low-value. Bummer. But digging into the business model was the real kicker:

The group is top-of-funnel, selling members into a paid membership.

Membership comes with three perks:

1. Education

2. Events

3. Promoting your business

Which is fine, except that:

1. The “education” is workshops led by other members that serve as top-of-funnel for their own business. The few I saw were very entry-level and poorly done, and there is no vetting process to determine expertise and experience.

2. The events are an additional cost and are run by volunteer members.

3. The promotional part? It means that paid members get to advertise their business in the Facebook group to all the other members.

The whole thing is a lesson in exploitive, thoughtless community strategy. Gathering as many people as you can in order to exploit their attention is a poor approach, not to mention just bad business. The people in this group have no other shared traits aside from a general demographic; not industry, experience, or psychographic, which means the odds of a promotional post even being relevant to many members are quite low. Bad for the poster. Bad for the reader.

There is a crucial delineation to be made here: it’s ok to pay Hulu 10 extra bucks a month to remove ads. It is not ok to make a specific promise to members and not only way-under deliver but to sell their attention to increase your bottom line.

It’s abusing the very concept of community.

Unpacking the Short-Sightedness of Trust Exploitation in Communities

The landscape of communities continues to evolve, and there are a lot of creative models out there, but a concerning trend has emerged. Some communities begin as free, welcoming spaces but later introduce a paid tier for their members, allowing them to market to the unpaid participants. It's a strategy that might offer short-term gains, but it's a short-sighted path that often leads to long-term damage in three categories:

1. Trust

Trust is where communities are built. When members enter a community, they do so with the expectation of real relationships and valuable content. It’s the glue that holds these communities together. Exploiting this trust by allowing paid members to market to free participants is akin to undermining the very foundation upon which your community stands.

Building trust takes time, but losing it can happen in a heartbeat. This strategy jeopardizes the quality of the group, and it can have far-reaching consequences for your community's long-term health.

While quick wins will always have their appeal, we have to look beyond short-term gains and consider the broader implications: a decline in member engagement and loyalty.

Data supports this. Communities built on unbroken trust have higher member retention rates and more active participants. In contrast, communities that prioritize quick profits often find themselves losing members at a rapid pace and eventually run out of top-of-funnel members.

2. Brand Reputation

Beyond community health, this strategy can tarnish a brand's reputation. Imagine joining a community to connect with like-minded individuals only to be bombarded with sales pitches. The disappointment and disillusionment that follow can spill over to your brand image. I promise you that I will never hear of this community again without instantly recalling this experience.

I’ve used this analogy often, but inviting community members in is like inviting people over for a party. If you invited folks over to chat, share wisdom, and swap war stories, and instead immediately subject them to a series of Tupperware and Amway pitches, you can bet your petunias they’re leaving with a much different view of who you are and what your words mean. Virtual doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. Virtual means we work harder.

3. Disillusionment

This particular model is often a lose-lose-win scenario:

• The people who join the free community with high hopes lose when they realize they’re just a glorified email list.

• The people who pay to upgrade lose when they post promotional threads, often very poorly thought through, and get no real engagement.

• The founder wins because they’re collecting money without doing any vetting or running of events or education.

Very few members will win. Very few will see any real transformation, and here’s the danger: very few members will say anything. There’s a real trap that community leaders face: unhappy members rarely say anything. Rather, they simply disengage, which means any remaining activity you see will likely reinforce the idea that things are going well, and given Facebook's limited data reporting, one would have to intentionally look for the problem in this particular case.

Alternative Approaches

Still, I don’t deny that there is real power in the network. If you’re in a community of professionals who may have value to offer each other, you can turn it into a delightful and useful benefit. It just takes a bit more work to do it thoughtfully.

Rather than taking the shortcut of exploiting trust, consider these alternative approaches:

• Directory: Community directories are underrated (and not often done well). Building out a database of members and what they have to offer can be a huge value unlock. If you’re unable to vet everyone, make that disclaimer clear. The directory should be uniform and searchable.

• Celebration: Rather than members posting about themselves, selecting a community member to highlight each month and writing a post celebrating their expertise and contributions gets them in front of everyone without the ick factor.

• Education: Allowing members to educate each other on relevant skills is a great idea. While working at HubSpot, I often facilitated these events using a three-pronged approach:

  • Vetting: First, I would pay careful attention to conversations in the community, noticing which people consistently provided quality answers and demonstrated expertise. I would also stalk their websites and track records before approaching them.

  • Organizing: Once we decided to move forward on an event, we followed a general template: A 60-minute event would include around 40 minutes of education, 20 minutes of Q&A, and a clean, helpful deck. The presenter was welcoming to spend a minute or two introducing themselves and their expertise, including their own branding, and close with a final slide on how to reach out if folks were interested in working with them.

  • Facilitating: Either myself or a fellow community leader facilitated these calls. Rather than just leave it up to the presenter to handle the event, we were there to welcome and introduce them, field questions, and keep the conversation on track. Our guest teachers were volunteering their time and expertise and deserved to be treated as honored guests.

The irony is that I would have happily paid for a membership with the group I encountered had these alternatives been chosen. They could have easily made money off of me by doing it right.

To be clear: the short-sightedness of allowing paid members to promote to the group will always work. That’s what makes it such a tempting feature to offer: it plays to members’ biggest desire: more business. But if you want to build a community of high-quality thinkers, one where every member sees the value, it’s way too basic a strategy.

Don’t be basic. Anna is watching.

Marinade

A few things I’ve read this week that are worth soaking in:

• If you’re a solopreneur, here’s Justin Welsh’s 4 million dollar sales funnel.

• Rosie Sherry struck a real chord with me this week when she asked “Have we forgotten the humanity behind our online community?”

• A compelling distinction between interested & obsessed.

Onward,

April

Want to build an outstanding community? I can help in three ways:

1. Getting started? Here’s a free 7-day email course 👉🏼 Start your community

2. Check out the CommunityOS Masterclass, a pithy, low-cost course covering all of the basics of community strategy 👉🏼 Get it here

3. Need full support on strategy, launch, and/ or execution? Book a call with our agency. 👉🏼 Schedule here