New online and offline networks are forming every day. Yet people of all ages feel lonelier.
Businesses and technology can influence how communities form and interact. Whether they become more connected or fragmented. Open or hostile. Superficial or supportive.
In the past few articles, we’ve been discussing how to practically implement a betterness portfolio. We’ve gone into depth about different ways you can invest your resources to build wealth for society and a successful business at the same time.
While human wealth focused on individuals, social wealth is about the relationships between them. Both the quality and quantity of those connections.
Why are relationships and social wealth valuable?
- Social connection helps with loneliness and depression. Thanks to millions of years of evolution, loneliness is painful. To try to ease that pain, people often turn to other destructive behaviors.
- Being able to reach out to friends and contacts helps connect people with resources that they need, especially when times are tough.
- Strong relationships help communities and companies become more resilient and recover from setbacks because people trust and support each other.
- Genuine interactions provide another layer of emotional connection with your brand. People remember how your business made them feel.
- Having friends at work makes people more engaged and productive.
- Most challenges require a large number of people to work together. When social wealth in your company or community is low, individuals feel isolated. And are therefore less likely to take action toward the common goal.
Some ways to create social wealth with your portfolio
- Support local community events and groups (ex. meetups, schools, library and government events).
- Match people who would not otherwise easily find each other.
- Host your own events and forums to attract people with shared interests and values. Bonus if you partner with another business to connect both of your communities. Extra bonus if this event becomes a regular tradition.
- Mentor others.
- Encourage civic involvement.
- Focus on building trust between your customers and your brand, employees, and suppliers.
- Focus on building trust between your customers.
- Address issues related to violence and security.
- Connect former customers with existing or potential customers (ex. past customers return as mentors or instructors).
- Foster meaningful connections between families and close friends.
- Foster meaningful connections between acquaintances.
- Focus on present and meaningful customer service.
- Participate in existing communities. Bonus if you volunteer to lead something.
- Host a retreat to help a small group create deeper bonds.
- Promote and support existing groups that your fans have created.
- Build a group or marketing campaign around a higher-level value that your customers share (REI and Harley-Davidson do this well).
- Facilitate in-depth discussions that go beyond small talk to core values, current challenges, and dreams.
- Create opportunities for employees to showcase different aspects of their lives and personalities, instead of being 100% focused on output.
- Examine the social implications of your business, including your messaging, products, services, and algorithms (both intended and unintended consequences).
- Share authentic stories, not just the polished versions.
How to incorporate social wealth generation into your portfolio process
You can fold a social perspective into each of the portfolio essentials with a few tweaks.
Current State
Analyze the current networks of your customers or potential customers. To find this information, you could look at their social media profiles and schedule a few interviews.
Some questions to answer could be:
- Which groups are they already a part of online and offline?
- How many communities are they a member of?
- Who do they spend the most time with?
- What kinds of conversations are they engaging in?
- When do they prefer to engage online vs. offline?
- Who’s in their inner circle?
- Who would they like to have a closer connection to?
- In order to further their goals, whom should they connect with (even though they might not realize it yet)?
- What do they like about their existing communities and what don’t they like?
- How much time and effort are they able to invest in their communities?
Future State
Define what the community might look like in the future. What format would best serve the needs of your customers and the role you want your business to play?
What’s the size of the community? How are people welcomed in? When and how are people engaging? What encourages them to stay?
What role will your company play? Is this community directly linked to your brand or something tangential that you and your employees can participate in?
Value Framework
When evaluating the value of an initiative, elevate product and service ideas that positively contribute to social bonds. Consider the measurements that best fit with your business model and company values.
For example, will people get value out of simply finding each other or in building a deeper connection? Ex. helping people find a new local restaurant to try out vs. helping them support the institutions they already love and get to know the owners better.
Portfolio Allocation
Connect your portfolio allocation to your business model. If community is the main way that you engage with your customers and is the best way for your customers to receive the value you’re providing, then you’ll allocate more attention and resources there.
If your core business is more transactional or one-to-one right now, then slowly experiment with ways to connect people, or allocate a small portion of resources to engaging in existing communities.
Execution Support
Share your goals with anyone in a customer-facing role. Encourage them to brainstorm how they could change their part of the experience to build community. You could set up forums for people to discuss insights, lessons learned, and inspiration.
Participating in and especially running an engaging community can be a full-time job. Hiring one or more community managers can help support a thriving community that spreads by word of mouth.
Research & Experimentation
People don’t always behave the way we expect. So before going for a big launch, try small events like dinners, masterminds, and workshops where you bring people together.
Afterward, reflect on how it went. How did people react? Would they want to continue attending similar events? What would you change for the next round?
Intake Process
You can find existing groups all over, whether in social networks, databases, local publications, or word of mouth at networking events. The comments that people make in these groups could be great input for your portfolio. You could also reach out to community leaders for their insights on how your company could get involved.
Dynamic Views
Tracking community metrics internally can help you decide what to try next. How many people are engaged on a regular basis, and how long do they stay in the community? Which activities or conversations are going well and which fizzle out? How often are you participating? Don’t forget to collect and share testimonials to provide more context.
An external view of the frequency of events, types of engagements, and the makeup and size of the group (some people prefer small, others large) can help participants decide ahead of time if joining your community would be a good fit.
In business, we’re constantly interacting with people and building solutions to make their lives better. So we’re in a great position to help cultivate social bonds among our customers and local communities.
Over the course of this series on implementing a betterness portfolio, we’ll continue to discuss other sources of wealth to fold into your portfolio process.
How will you incorporate these ideas into your business? Do you have other ideas of how to build social wealth with an enterprise portfolio?