Communities > community
If you are a business, community is where your ecosystem meets brand experience.
It's where your partner organization meets your marketing organization. It's the first step of building your own ecosystem.
It seems like everyone agrees that community is important, but how to bake it into your strategy isn't so clear. We'll see a lot more examples - good and bad - unfolding in the decade of ecosystem, and hopefully gain more insight.
A good place to start is by realizing it's not about a single community where your partners and customers live, but a network of overlapping communities. Getting a bit of a handle on these amorphous networks of trust and influence is no easy task, but it's worth the effort.
Here's a big list of some partner communities
As mentioned in his most recent appearance on the PartnerUp podcast, Jay McBain has compiled a pretty extensive list of the "watering holes" for partners.
The magic behind finding, recruiting and nourishing a top performing channel boils down to three simple questions about partners:
1. What do they read?
2. Where do they go?
3. Who do they follow?
There are over 600,000 tech service companies. There are 56 magazines and 150 trade-shows. Seems overwhelming.
But Jay shares an example of how you could break it down and focus:
[I]f you were to look at the MSP (managed services provider) market, you would find 31 distinct communities that highly influence the 50,000 MSPs globally. Targeting these 31 communities is a manageable and, for many vendors, profitable market.
You can find the full article here. It's one of those that's a great resource to return to with a quick control+f when you're looking for communities in your market.
Poll of the day
Source: Allan Adler
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