Over the next few weeks I anxiously contemplated what the test would reveal. What I learned was not what I expected. Aside from a long list of traits and conditions—apparently women with my genotype show a greater tendency to overeat, didn’t exactly need a genetic test to figure that one out—there was also a long list of surveys to fill out. Ever since taking my first personality quiz in GirlsLife magazine, I can’t get enough of surveys. Love them. But this time filling them out was directly contributing to scientific research that could tell me more about MY GENES. How cool is that?

The genius in the 23andMe model is their ability to pair the give and the get by identifying their core needs and creating a sustainable way to acquire them. The best community models leave members better off than they were before the interaction. In nature, this is known as a mutualistic symbiotic relationship; if you’ve seen Finding Nemo, you’ll recall the classic clownfish and sea anemone example. The give and get for these two are perfectly paired: the clownfish attracts prey to the anemone and once the anemone kills the prey, the clownfish feeds off of the remains while simultaneously cleaning the anemone.

While the 23andme model is not as gruesome, it has perfectly paired gives and gets. The company charges a flat fee for an initial analysis and then a monthly fee for regular updates based on new discoveries. Once users sign in, they are given the option to complete surveys about their health history, behaviors and traits. Armed with a DNA bank and the surveys, 23andme has the data they need to make new discoveries. And their users directly benefit from it by getting regularly updated, personalized genetic insights. Usually research institutes have to pay subjects to fill out surveys and the like; 23andMe has figured out how to get the research subjects to pay to participate!

23andMe has created a generative marketplace around genetic information by managing a call and response between individual patients and researchers. The more people who sign up, the larger 23andMe’s database grows and, as those of you who work with data know, the chance of finding significant correlations (i.e. new discoveries) increases. By making DNA personal and sharing more information, people are motivated to contribute. In a time when one’s own personal health information is surprisingly difficult to acquire, 23andMe puts this information in the user’s hands and gives them the opportunity to participate in the scientific process.

What would a generative marketplace look like in your world? What are your organization’s needs and who can fulfill them? What can your organization offer in reciprocation and how are you facilitating this exchange?

First, define your community. Is it your internal stakeholders? Your customers? Or a group even larger than that? Remind yourself that you’re acting as part of that community; find that all-important intersection of needs and wants. You’ll give yourself a huge head start with this mindset.

That said, communities are loose-knit and self-identifying, which means you won’t be able to ask everyone what they want before you take action. The good news: network theory shows that communities appreciate honesty and reward good intentions. Even if your idea isn’t 100% on the money, if you’re acting from a place of sincerity, purpose and progress, odds are good that the community will embrace you anyway.

Finally, there is the network structure:
Motivation – an inspiring goal that feeds the emotional needs of your community
Incentive – a big-picture vision that justifies peoples’ desire to participate
Transaction – the mechanism that enables participation, be it a contest, stated goal, etc
Reward – public recognition and/or monetary compensation

Let’s look at an example. The X Prize was driven by pure desire. People were motivated to solve the challenge of sending a rocket into space because it was a way to fulfill a childhood dream. X Prize founder Peter Diamandis understood this because he had always wanted to be an astronaut himself. And what he found when he started asking members of his community – in this case, billionaires – is that they did, too.

Of course, he also knew that pioneering a citizen-run space program would be a powerful business incentive for these lifelong entrepreneurs.

So the motivation was to fulfill a childhood dream.
The incentive was to start a highly profitable market of space tourism.
The transaction was a prize – a race to send a rocket into orbit twice within 48 hours.

Peter intuited his community’s needs and wants, lined those up against their motivations, and created a very powerful incentive structure (the ability to go to market). But he also knew that people needed a reward ($10M). It costs a lot of time and money to send a rocket into space twice in two days; in fact, the winner spent approximately $20 million. But it didn’t matter because he wanted to have this experience so badly, and it was worth it to his investors (Paul Allen and Richard Branson) because they could see the business opportunity. So those incentives and rewards balanced out the hurdles of participating.

On top of all that, the winning team is now famous. They lived their dream of going to space, recouped 50% of their investment, and are now publicly recognized as the industry leaders. The model of rising from idle billionaire to one who is revolutionizing the world – from citizen scientist to groundbreaking rocket ship builder – it’s wild. It captures people’s excitement.

And at the end of the day, that’s the real goal. You don’t need a rocket ship to do it. You just need a thoughtful approach and the right network structure.
Photo: Mayhem

This is a classic story. We all go to conferences, galas, dinners, parties and workshops where we are excited by the sense of joining this new, passionate community but soon let down by the limited ability to sustain and enhance the experience.

What we’re craving is a network: the action-oriented structures on top of the values, bonds and purpose of the community.

That structure usually looks something like this:

Of course, getting the characteristics of the network right is not easy. First, you have to ask yourself: who is your community? What do they care about? That will help you define the goal and the network you build to achieve it.

Like most car buyers, we talked to family and friends and did plentiful online research. Our plan was to test drive a few options while visiting family in Florida, then buy once we returned to Portland. It worked out really well, minus one factor: the blistering sales tactics of auto dealers.

As many of you may know (and some of you may be part of this world on a daily basis), car dealers often focus on extremely high-pressure sales, which means they will go to absurd lengths to get your business. For us, this meant tactics like keeping us from leaving the dealership by “misplacing” the registration card for our trade-in (seriously). What was fascinating is that we were actually trying to join the dealer’s community, where we could build a long-term, values-based relationship. But their sole concern seemed to be making the sale at hand.

For the 100th time, the dealer asked me to tell him what would make me happy, as if I were at a therapy session. Annoyed, I pulled out my phone and used USAA’s Auto Circle app to get some advice. What I found was a new service they offer called TrueCar. TrueCar has built an intelligence network of recently purchased vehicles and relationships with dealerships across the country, which they use to pre-negotiate prices. Sitting right in front of the salesman, an iPhone app allowed me to obtain a dealer-approved price that was $7,000 less than what he was offering, at the same dealership.

Now if I was a car dealer, I would look at this model and say, “Oh $h!%, our business model is dead!” Then after some reflection I might say, “Hey, let’s join the party.” Services like TrueCar help dealers lower sales costs for their customers. A smart dealer will take that goodwill and use it to start building a community, offering rewards for referrals and return purchases.

In my opinion, if the newspaper is a dying business model, then the car dealership isn’t far behind. If I can join USAA and use a mobile app while at the dealership to get a very good, pre-negotiated price, then why do I need a high-pressure sales person? And if this is happening at a car dealership, where will it happen next? And how do you stay ahead of the curve?

Our sales person with my wife and daughter at the dealership as we’re picking up our new purchase.

How are the organizers of TED able to pull this off? They broke all the rules of branding and built a community around their core purpose instead.

In February 2009, TED organizers decided to expand the universe of “ideas worth spreading” to include independent TEDx events organized by people much like you and me. Not only did they believe we could pull off our own community-centric TEDs, but they gave us what amounts to a cookbook on the TED website, with step-by-step instructions. The ingredients and recipes are right there for you to take so long as you meet the rules of the license to call your event TEDx.

We’ve organized over 2,500 TEDx events since TED showed us how.

What intrigues me about this “cookbook” model is how it serves to both satisfy the wants of our own communities while simultaneously increasing the desirability of the main TED events themselves. If you’ve got a successful restaurant (TED), why bother to give away your recipes to the public at large (TEDx)?

Let’s look at The French Laundry. Thomas Keller has done a fantastic job of creating what many consider to be the ultimate dining experience at his Michelin-starred restaurant in Yountville, California. Along with opening up other well-received, less exclusive restaurants around the country, Keller has published large-format cookbooks with pictures and recipes and anecdotes so detailed that anyone can copy him.

But of course they can’t.

I fancy myself a good cook, and I have a signed copy of Thomas Keller’s French Laundry cookbook on my shelf, but there’s no way I can replicate the experience of actually traveling to Yountville to sit down at the white linen table for the real deal. Keller obviously makes a little money from each cookbook sold, but the meals prepared from those recipes only serve as a stark reminder of how good the real deal in Yountville actually is.

The same close-but-no-cigar concept holds for TEDx, too. No matter how good a local organizer is in selecting speakers and wooing an audience and choosing the most appropriate TED Talks to screen, their TEDxSomething is simply no substitute for the gathering of minds and personalities orchestrated every spring in Long Beach and, now, Palm Springs.

I imagine the initial suggestion to launch the TEDx brand was likely greeted with a chorus of concerns about diluting the value of the TED brand. But the results show that TEDx has actually served to drive demand for the real deal while crystallizing their ownership of the meme “ideas worth spreading.” They’ve transcended the lucrative real-world community of once-yearly participants and grown to become a global and even grassroots community dedicated to spreading world-changing ideas.

- Thomas Kriese

These are just five of the literally dozens of lessons we’ve gleaned over the past year. Most central is that we found a way to leverage both established models (like Ganz) and the real experts: the community members themselves. To do so required building long-term relationships that went well beyond school visits or hour-long interviews. Luckily, Knight Foundation not only supported us but challenged us to deliver real results.

BME is just in its first year, but based on the thousands who have already joined, we think it’s here to stay.

image source: Andrew Potter

However, when people use the terms “corporation” and “community” in the same sentence, they are usually talking about community relations, (i.e. corporate philanthropy) where resources, information, knowledge and know-how travel in a one-way direction from the company to a non-profit. In traditional community relations, there’s (usually) no flow (of anything) back to the company and no on-going purpose beyond profits. In addition, traditionally a corporation’s relationship with its community has been a defensive move, more of a “let’s avoid being in a Michael Moore film” public relations strategy.

What we argue that a corporation’s thoughtfulness in engaging their customers, suppliers and other stakeholders can be an offense play: something that helps build the business, strengthen the brand and deepen competitive advantage. Through dynamic interactions—fueled by a common purpose and powered by technology—a flow of information between the company and its community can help to strengthen its value proposition and overall business.

Some companies have begun to experiment with this flow. Take Pepsi’s RefreshEverything. A massive social marketing campaign aimed at building Pepsi brand awareness, it has captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of high-energy, activist-types and their personal networks.

Or Google Summer of Code, a global program building a community of future professional developers through stipends to write code for open source software projects. In its six-plus years of existence, GSoC has brought together 4,500+ students and their 4,000+ mentors from around the world. More accessible-to-all source code gets built, and students around the world are given new opportunities. Also good for Google? I’d say so.

These two examples combine corporate social responsibility with branding, social marketing and community-building. But there are other frontiers to explore. Consider the following:
What if you could ask thousands of your product’s “power users” about a design choice and get answers within minutes?
What if you could solve thorny distribution issues by engaging your suppliers in the problem-solving process?
What if your customers mobilized themselves to change legislation favorable to your product?
The list is endless.

The power of communities is on the rise. And technology is rapidly evolving to support and speed up its influence. Corporations face the decision to embrace the energy and empower the movement—or stick to “safe” business models that run the risk of being leapfrogged by those willing to experiment with new approaches.

So the real question is: when are other retailers going to get the picture? When will they realize that by connecting with their communities in creative ways, they will gain powerful insights into their core business?

I guess for now, all eyes are on the Treasure…

Flaming Lips is a 20+ year-old psychedelic rock band that puts on one of the most bizarre and entertaining shows out there. (Catch a short clip here.) Described by Chicago Now as “a twisted, acid-soaked circus,” the concerts draw a crowd ranging from families to individuals adorned in fuzzy animal costumes, all in search of the rare moment to express their most imaginative selves. In fact, that probably best describes the purpose of this community: a love of imagination.

Here are the rituals that take place at every single Flaming Lips concert:
The lead singer, Wayne Coyne, opens the show by walking across the audience inside an enormous transparent balloon, engaging people in a very real and physical way, and proving his trust in them in the process.

Then he goes back onstage and celebrates that interaction – with balloons and confetti and their favorite music.

The third step is inviting people onstage who are not band members. Ecstatic dancing fans dressed in giant catfish and alien costumes emerge from the side of the stage, chosen by request through the band’s website.

Finally, he invites you to share the music with him, delivering a song you know all the words to so you can sing along.

After these first crazy 20 minutes, it isn’t really about the band anymore; it’s about interacting with the people around you. And there are tools to facilitate that interaction as well – balloons, dancing, crazy technicolor light shows, songs you can sing with the person sitting next to you because you both know the words. These rituals are strong enough to carry the whole rest of the concert, maintain a thriving relationship with the band and, perhaps most profoundly, develop a trust among fellow audience members so strong that they’re willing to present their most creative, uninhibited, catfish-costumed selves.

Props to the band: they really have to put themselves out there to accomplish this feat. Every night, Wayne steps into that audience hoping that they will continue to hold him up.

Now, you and I probably can’t open a conference by crowd-surfing in a giant bubble. (Though I would love to see somebody try it.) But we can think about ways to immediately interact with the audience, demonstrating trust and commitment. We can look for ways to celebrate their trust. We can endeavor to invite participation, not just in a one-to-one exchange, but in a constant, porous relationship that engages the whole community. And we can consider bonding rituals that the community will want to conduct on its own.

The example is fantastical, but it’s worth asking yourself: what kind of concert would you design? What are your rituals? And how do they reward the purpose of your community?

image source:The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

Let me give an example. A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with two foundations, a group of non-profits and a few corporations. Collectively we were discussing the need for “community” tools, namely an online platform, to increase collaboration. After nearly a half hour one participant said, “I have to ask, what do we mean by community?” The meeting literally stopped. Everyone began looking at each other and then after an awkward sixty-second pause, the question was glossed over by the group agreeing, “We all know what we mean.” But did we?

It’s not surprising that any group would grapple with this question. Just looking at the Wikipedia entry for community tells us that there were over 94 discrete definitions of community by the mid-1950s alone. At Context Partners we define community as a group of people interacting around a common purpose. It’s a pretty simple definition.

What I believe was being asked in that meeting is “what makes a successful community?” I love the explanation of a successful community articulated by Bo Burlingham in his book, Small Giants, about uniquely successful small businesses.
My synthesis of Burlingham’s three key principles are:

1. Integrity: members are who they say the are
2. Professionalism: members do what they say they do
3. Connection: members connect to create a emotional bond based on a common purpose

When we talk about community we can’t help but move from the definition directly to its anatomy. And with the focus on integrity, professionalism and connection we force a real discussion about what makes a great community and our roles in its success.

So, the question for each of us is: are we applying those three principles in our work and our communities? And if not, what steps will we take to get started?