Trust and Community Building: What Your Members Really Want

Exploitation is never a feature 

Let's talk about a troubling trend in brand community building that's masquerading as a feature but is actually eroding the very foundation of what makes communities work. I recently witnessed this firsthand, and it's time to sound the alarm about trust exploitation in community spaces.

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:

🚨 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:

Which is fine, except that:

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:

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:

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.