How a focus on community can help you leapfrog the competition

The power and purpose of community

This story is a testament to change and a focus on community.

I joined David & Charles (D&C) as Managing Director and Publisher in  August 2008. I was brought in for an interim period to refocus the business and inject new ideas.

D&C had been publishing niche hobby books for it’s club members  since the early days when the original owners, David St John Thomas and Charles Hadfield, were involved.

But, in an age of rapidly changing consumer expectation and new positive marketing options, the company needed new leadership and fresh ideas.

In a relatively short time following my appointment I made several key strategic decisions to re focus the core business activity and restructure the teams around customer segments which allowed the business to move forward on a new direction and, in particular, to concentrate on a significant number of new opportunities that clustered around building brand communities.

Building community is so important for niche publishers. The change in business thinking comes from considering yourself as a community rather than a publisher. Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, newsletters, consumer offers and building an active community (engaging and communicating with those discussing your topics) are all critical to a shift in business practices. Giving authors a voice online and tweeting articles whilst publishing them on the community blog and wrapping them into a pdf for download or offering them as a Youtube video for promotion and viral canvassing are all highly effective ways of driving traffic, engagement and sales of physical or digital goods. Hence, in a very short space of time the company was breaking into new territory and leapfrogging the competition.

The key to success of such a transformation is recognising that change is inevitable and then planning for it and communicating the plans again and again with staff do drive organisational development.

There are many more great opportunities like this one in the new digital age and I am persuaded many other traditional media businesses will reappraise their core purpose and reinvent their business models to better focus on customers and serving community.

That, after all, is what we, as customers, expect: to be served and served better.