Why Community Is The Future Of Marketing

Today we are going to talk about why community is the future of marketing. So my name is Eric Siu and I have a portfolio of different businesses and I'm here to help level up the world. And in today's video, we are going to talk about why this is so important. So when you think about what's happening with the internet right now, you have a lot of these centralized powers such as Facebook, now called Meta, Google, now called Alphabet, and they've done a good job with product development, but it's probably not a good thing to have all the power consolidated to just a couple of these companies, right? A little too much power there. What happens is with the power of Web3 now, so Web3 is kind of the future of the internet, whether you want to talk about DeFi, crypto, you want to talk about NFTs, anything like that. What's happening right now, you can see it very quickly, is, you know, how these projects are being launched. It's all community-based. And, you know, when I think about the events that I've been to pre-pandemic, going to TED, going to Singularity University, joining groups like YPO, joining groups like EO, These are all communities that I wanted to be a part of. I've created my own communities as well with our Growth Accelerator events, you know, Marketing School. We've done a lot of these different things. It's because of the power of people. Through people, you're able to make a lot of connections, right? You can connect the dots, not just from a business sense, but also from a personal sense too. And then because you start to understand the person more, you want to get to know them more, you can even connect further dots and make connections on things that they're interested in. And things that they might need, and you could connect them with other friends too. And then that's how the world goes around. We kind of just keep helping each other out. But if you don't develop that in-person kind of relationship or even virtual relationship, it's hard to really go deep with someone. For me, I used to be very utilitarian and I used to be very, you know, transactional. And I think to an extent all human beings are, but the more we can all focus on relationships, the more we can all focus on the long-term, the better. And that's where community comes in. And so why is community the future of marketing? Well, back in 2010, when people used to talk about how social media was a joke and social media can't be a real job, and then it became a real job, that's very much how I see community right now. Like, sure, there are community managers, but not to the extent of what I'm seeing kind of in the world of NFTs, in the world of crypto right now. Like, this is another level. I think to really understand what it means to create a good community, I'm going to pull up an acronym that my friend David Spinks put together, and he wrote a book called The Business of Belonging. Before I show you that, Again, why is community the future? Well, if we want to retain our customers more, we need to have a great community. If we want to have our customers advocate for us, we need a good community. If we want to have people that are maybe prospects converted to customers, maybe we invite them to a community. If we want to support our people, maybe it ties in with community as well. David Sminks, he's kind of a community master, and I've said the word community so many times now. You know, he had a company called CMX, which he sold to a community-based company called Bevy. And he just came out with that book. So let's talk about what this all means from a business sense, because business and marketing kind of go hand in hand. He has an acronym, David Spinks, called the SPACES model. And so that's an acronym that stands for S stands for support, P stands for product, A stands for acquisition, C stands for contribution, E stands for engagement, and S stands for success. And so here's an example, acquisition. So maybe when you're putting together your group, your community, you have to define what business value are you trying to derive from it? So acquisition, you might be trying to drive more customers, more leads, through your community. HubSpot is a good example of this. When they do their inbound conference, it's to drive new customers, but also to drive contribution from their customers, also drive engagement, and also help their customers be more successful. When I think about SaaStr as a conference or SaaStock, these are big SaaS conferences. You know, what do they do exactly? Well, they wanna help make their customers successful in the world of SaaS, right? They wanna drive engagement as well. They wanna be able to support their people. And so can you tackle all these things within Spaces? Probably, but should you aim for maybe one or two initially? Probably a better bet, right? It's a safer bet that way. You know what makes a lot of sense? I mean, by the way, you can go to cmxhub.com if you're looking to hire community people. They have a lot of resources out there where you can learn more. You can definitely pick up the book too. But that's why we do the Growth Accelerator event. That's what we're making into a DAO, which is a decentralized autonomous organization. We're making that into a larger community where there isn't one kind of central head, right? We're kind of trying to democratize it a little bit, and maybe we can kind of co-invest in deals together. We can do a lot of cool things together. Maybe we can You know, share discount codes and stuff. I mean, that's what a community is at the end of the day. People want to engage with other people. Even though I'm an introvert, I still like engaging with other people because there's a lot of magic that comes in with that, right? A lot of companies just aren't prepared for this right now. They aren't thinking about what does it mean for us to put together a community? Do we need to hire a VP of community, a chief community officer, whatever that means exactly? Because what's going to happen is with Web3, you could see a lot of developer activity is going into this space where people are building these great products, the power is going to start to not be consolidated to the Facebooks and the Googles anymore. The power is going to go back to the people. And if you want to think about marketing for the future, you got to be thinking about how can you build an audience first and then how can you build a corresponding community to that long-term. This forces, this is a forcing function for long-term thinking. And if you want to become rich, you want to become wealthy, you have to think like a long-term investor. And this forces that, right? Anytime I've done something that, that's short-term, it just doesn't work out because I'm not focused on creating a great product or a great experience for people or great service for people. This is your opportunity to do so. And this is going to require more studying than just beyond just kind of listening to this or watching this. But that's where I think things are going to go. I'm super excited about it because it's going to set the bar a lot higher. Now you can't just half-ass it when you create a piece of content. You can't half-ass it when you create an event. You can't half-ass it when you create a community. You got to full-ass it, right? And so that means creating something that's 10x better, 100x better than whatever else that's out there. And so I'm super excited to see the bar being raised for people that want to play this game. It's not an easy game to play, but you know, it's a very simple game to play. So it's simple, not easy. And if you enjoyed this video, please drop a comment below. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you think I missed anything. And don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button. That's how excited I am about all this stuff. But, um, community, that's where it's at. And if you want more stuff like this, don't forget to check out our other stuff and we'll catch you later. Peace.