The Power of Client Communities

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Imagine the power of creating a community of clients who not only have a relationship with you but are also in community with each other. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Carrie Melissa Jones. Carrie is a community builder, entrepreneur, and community management consultant who has helped create community strategies for presidential campaigns, nonprofits, small businesses, and the Fortune Global 50. She's also the co-author of Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging. In today's conversation, we explore the concept of building a community and creating a sense of belonging among your clients and your team members. Along the way, we discuss organizations such as the Harley Owners Group, the Microsoft Alumni Network, political campaigns, and companies like Starbucks, and how you can apply their strategies to building your own communities. So let's get started with Carrie Melissa Jones. I'd love to start by digging into your history a little bit, because as I was doing some of my research, it appears that you had a bit of a difficult childhood. And yet here you are as one of the country's leading experts on building brand community. So I'd love for you to connect the dots between how you grew up and how you ended up being an expert in communities and building a variety of different communities.

Yeah, so it's always like we're trying to resolve our own problems, right, the work that we do. I guess that's been my story. But I mean, yeah, I had a tough— especially adolescence, a really rough time growing up and, and not knowing how to connect with people. And so when I was— especially when I was in high school, there was a number of family dramas going on and mental health issues within my family. And I didn't know who to reach out to or who to turn to. And I was, I was a very, very quiet kid. I was so quiet. People would often ask me, you know, like, is she okay? My, my mother was asked if I was mute by a teacher once that I had just started going to, to her class. And so, yeah, I was very, very quiet. I didn't know who to turn to. And then right around this time, my father had been working in technology since the early '90s and decided, you're old enough. Old enough now, about 15, and you're old enough now, we'll give you your own computer. So he unleashed the power of the internet for me. And I discovered during that time period when I was really wrestling with a lot, actually, of all places, music forums on the internet. And I thought I would go there and just find, you know, some other music fans, I would delve more into my favorite artists and learn more about their stories and things like that. But it turned out What I quickly realized was that people were sharing all kinds of things about themselves within these online forums. And so I quickly made new friends and could really be my full self within these spaces. People would actually ask and, and listen to my answers. We would talk on the phone, travel around to meet each other. And it was the first time in my life that I realized that it was safe to share what was actually going on in my life. That was a huge wake-up call to me that I couldn't just hold everything in. And as I I got older, I don't think I connected those explicitly. But now looking back, it's very clear to me that I saw that that was one way to resolve some of the constant and pervasive loneliness, isolation, and feeling of that we're alone in this world, um, was to go to the internet and use it for good. Plenty of ways to not use it for good, but this is one of the ways that you certainly can harness its power and connect people all over the world.

You touched on loneliness, and obviously that's a problem and has been a problem in our country, in our world, for a long, time, and there's never a bad time to build a community and to be in a community. But in your case, how do you define community? And then also, you use the word brand community. So what do you mean when you say brand community?

Yeah, great question. So most people have their own kind of homegrown definition of what the word community means for them. And for me and my work and with my clients, the way that I'm defining it is a group of people who share mutual concern for one another's welfare. And that definition comes from my co-author Charles Vogel and one of my mentors in this work. And specifically that mutual care and concern is so important because so many of us in our definitions of and experience of community forget that it's not just social media, that it's not just a giant network of people on the internet. It's actually a group of people that care about one another, and that's what's often missing. So when we're talking about a brand community, really all that means is that an identifiable organization is the one running it, not just a loose neighborhood coalition or maybe like your apartment building. I used to live in an apartment building, had a Facebook group. I wouldn't consider that a brand community because it's just more of a grassroots effort versus an organization such as, you know, Harley-Davidson or Sephora or Microsoft leading a brand community effort.

Okay. And we know there's a lot of companies out there that wanna jump on this brand community bandwagon and they feel like, oh, I'm going to be hip, I'm going to be cool if we create a community around our brand. What would you say are the mistakes that those companies make and what would be a good example? I think you mentioned Harley, you mentioned Sephora, but maybe give some more detail on what are those brands doing right to build a real and authentic community versus other firms that might just try and jump on the bandwagon and have a pseudo community or a fake community.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. What we call mirage communities. So I think there's nothing wrong with having this initial inclination of we gotta keep up, we gotta get on the bandwagon. I welcome everybody onto the bandwagon. The issue and the problem that most people run into, however, is that they don't realize that this is about actually transforming the relationships that you have with your customer. It's not about just being cool, being like one of the cool brands to do this. It's actually about being in a different kind of relationship, one of mutual influence. Between your customer and yourself or other stakeholders within your organization. And that is a really big shift for an organization to make, especially one that's used to just putting out messages and then going back and doing the work and then putting out messages as opposed to listening to people, gathering people, getting consensus, getting to know people better before just putting out messages and then doing work behind the scenes. So it's, it's a truly transformational kind of relationship.

So let's do a little compare and contrast here. So a lot of the folks listening to this are financial advisors. They have clients, and some of these advisors try to create communities among their clients. For example, maybe they have a lot of clients that like to drink wine, so they'll create a little group of, oh, these were our wine drinkers, and let's create spaces or opportunities or events for them to get together. We'll do wine tastings, we'll bring a sommelier in or whatever. Maybe there's another group that like something else. They like reading books or something. Take a look at that group or community compared to, say, Harley, the Harley owners group. What do they do? What would be the differences and any advice you might have for someone who has the former group there, the, oh, we've got a group of wine drinkers and we create space for them to drink wine and talk about it. Maybe compare and contrast some differences there.

Yeah, well, first of all, I'd like to know who these financial advisors are.

You want to hire one, right?

Yes. Because I, I've never experienced that personally, but I have worked with a number of financial advisors who often will gather with other financial advisors, and that's typically how they're thinking about community building is like gathering with their peers versus clients. That's really interesting. But yeah, looking at how Harley or another brand might do it versus this kind of group of your clients. So the actual structures and architecture of the building of the community is exactly the same, actually. Like Harley's playbook can be applied to anybody, any organization that wants to build community. But the way it takes shape is going to be different. For example, like Harley organizes their groups by region or by like location. So they have a San Francisco Harley Owners Group, actually I think it's called the Golden Gate Harley Owners Group. They have ones throughout the state of, let's just say Tennessee, where my parents are, where they're members of their Harley Owners Groups. And that might be different for a financial advisor. It might be regional depending on how large your client base is, but it might, like you said, be more interest-based. So it's really just going to be around the ways the groups are organized would be different, but the foundations are the same in that you really have to get to know people. You have to know what they're even interested in to begin with. Like, where, when are you going to find that out? Um, usually it's through these deep conversations that you're having as a financial advisor, financial planner, whatever your job title might be. And then How are you going to actually start to bring them together in a way that's safe and in alignment with your legal responsibilities and things like that as a professional too?

You said that the playbook essentially would be the same whether it's a Harley owners group or, say, a financial advisor that wants to build a group. So tell me a little bit about the playbook. For example, in Harley's case, is this a corporately orchestrated organization where Harley Corporate basically created this? They've got employees that work this thing, or is it organic where the Harley owners just organically decided we want to create a group and then Harley sort of helps on the peripheral?

Harley Owners Groups, they come from corporate, and they were actually started in 1983, right when the Harley organization almost went bankrupt, actually. The whole organization might not exist today if it weren't for Harley Owner Groups. And it's because Some of the owners of the company ended up buying back the company from a private equity firm that had owned it at the time. And they were actually at the time where their manufacturing was moved to Pennsylvania. They said, we're going to move this back to Milwaukee where we came from, which is where I live. And I'm very proud of this. And we're going to make stops along the way. There's actual ride, the physical ride they did from Pennsylvania back to Milwaukee. And they did stops and met with hundreds of Harley riders on that journey. And they said, this is a model we can replicate actually. It doesn't just have to be the CEO going around and riding his Harley and meeting with people. People can be organizing these gatherings wherever they might be in the world. And so today what that looks like is there are entire teams at Harley dedicated to running these programs. They do an annual training, which I don't know if it's back in person. It was in person pre-pandemic, where they would bring the leaders of each local Harley group together to train them basically to run little businesses. Because each one does fundraising and give back campaigns. For example, the Golden Gate Harley group would always do toy drives around the holidays for children's hospitals and like how to lead an organization, how to take meeting notes, all of these things. So they train them how to do this and then deploy that work. The actual leaders of each regional group actually go and implement it and then they come back and share what's happening and continue iterating from there.

Okay. So that's a big difference between what Harley does versus a financial advisor who gets their clients together because they all like drinking wine. So Harley's not doing this for charity purposes. So what does Harley get out of this? What's the business objective for them wanting to spend all that time and money creating this?

Oh, sure. I mean, I'm not a spokesperson for Harley, so let me—

Right, right. I think it's a good example though. I'm here in Wisconsin too, so I think we both share an interest in Harley.

Yes. Yeah. So if you look at people when they actually are part of a club, a Harley owners group, so what that actually entails is you get insurance for your bike when you first join, you get added to groups. I think a lot of them meet weekly. Sometimes these groups meet multiple times a week in person. They usually will meet at dealerships. And so what this means is people are going to dealerships or sponsored by dealerships. They become loyal to that dealership. They spend money at that dealership and they end up spending more money on merchandise and more time on their bike, which means they're going to have to replace the bike more frequently, which means they're also going to— this is win-win. I'm saying this in a very, like, might sound extractive, but it's very win-win because the more people ride their bike and become part of this community around their motorcycle, the more they start to feel like the sense of belonging. So I've seen, for example, I am so obsessed with Harley because my parents are members of Harley owners groups and my dad has He was a leader of one in the Bay Area, and I saw it completely transform their lives after all of us kids had flown the nest. My father had always ridden motorcycles but had taken a big break, you know, when we were growing up and got a new Harley. I'm very excited about that and joined this group. And they made lifelong friends who they now live in Tennessee. They fly back to see at least once a year. They had one, you know, who actually helped renovate their home, like All of these connections get made and they also were able to travel all over. They went to Sturgis, the big motorcycle festival. They traveled all over the state of California with these people. They saw things they would never see. I just watched as it brought so much life back to them. So yeah, they spent a lot more money on leather goods and other kind of merchandise and repairs for the Harley and all that. It's created lifelong memories and friendships for them at the same time.

It sounds like it's affected you as well. You're very passionate about describing that.

Yeah, well, it's amazing to see someone you love be so impacted by something like that. It's really amazing.

And I love that example because as I think about a lot of the folks that are listening to this, they have a lot of clients. And so, they want their clients to feel like they're part of a, quote, "community of clients of the firm." So, that's like, I'm going to call maybe that a high-level, community, not to the degree, of course, what you're talking about here with Harley. But then there's, I would call it maybe concentric circles, where you can go deeper and deeper and deeper if you want to. But I'd also love to address the question of, can a company create a community with its employees? And maybe that ties into the culture. I mean, can we think of a community of our employees that way, or are we mixing apples and oranges here?

No, you absolutely can. Here's one of the things I've been holding about this work for the last couple of years, actually starting through the pandemic, is that the principles of community building, of building a brand community, are actually principles of creating any kind of change in the world. And so if we wanna change the culture of our organization, if we want our staff members to feel more of a sense of belonging, if we want them to feel more purposeful when they come to work, these are all things about wanting to create a change. And community and the process of building a community is an active process of going through that change with the people who are going through it with us. So again, instead of that, like, I'm gonna broadcast messages to you or tell you, here's what we're gonna do next. I'm gonna say, we're gonna gather and talk about what do you wanna see from our organization? What have you seen that maybe I'm not aware of? What are your concerns and needs as employees right now? And so you can have those conversations and then start to build and co-create things together. So if we wanna get down into the brass tacks of that, what that might end up looking like is something like an online community or online, like a lot of companies use Slack now or Microsoft Teams and just being really intentional about the way that that's architected and set up. That's the kind of shape it would take. Or it could look like a bunch of employee workshops or lunches or whatever else. It just has to be about the intention and the relationships that are being built.

Can you think of any example of a corporation, maybe a well-known one, that you think has the beginnings of creating a community among its employees, or they have a strong enough culture that you could almost view it as a branded community because they're so strong? Is there anyone out there that you would look to for that?

Oh yeah, really, if you're interested in this at all, I highly recommend checking out this concept of corporate alumni communities. So if you look at a company like Microsoft or Coca-Cola, for instance, these really big brands, they have their corporate intranets and places where people can work as employees, but then even after they leave the organization, they have people who will continue engaging with those employees. And I forget what the exact number is, but a very large number of hires at these companies are rehires, people that come back to the organization after a few years of moving on and learning something else outside the organization and then coming back to it. So yeah, there's a lot of organizations like this. I mean, if you look at— you can't see it on the outside. That's what's really tough is this stuff is all going on on the inside. But like Airbnb does a fantastic job of this inside of their organization. Microsoft is another great example. They have a bunch of employee groups like around people who are interested in AI or machine learning, specific branch of AI, and they do conferences and things that are just for employees. Now that's at a very large scale, but at a small scale you can apply the same idea being that like once someone leaves the organization, we can still continue to engage with them. It doesn't have to be like this break where we don't talk to them anymore, and we can organize things where we, you know, have events with them or do trainings with them or wherever else we might want to think about and do that with current employees as well.

Yeah, and up until recently, I probably would have put Starbucks in that category as well, because when Howard Schultz was running the company— I guess he's on his third trip at this point running the company. The first couple times, he seemed to really create a culture there, and people really seemed to enjoy working there. Yeah, of course, in the past year or so, there's been a big unionizing effort, and a number of the stores have been unionized, and there's some back and forth about how well Schultz is handling that. So maybe it's not quite the same today, but I suppose it's, it's hard to build the community but it's very easy to ruin the community as well.

That's absolutely true. And trust is hard to build back. But there's also, to the point about Starbucks, there's societal and cultural elements that impact our ability to build community as well. Like this unionization effort at Starbucks is obviously not the only unionization effort. There's Amazon, all these other places. There's a massive distrust of any kind of like centralized corporate power at this point. And that's, I think, caused a lot of people to create grassroots communities. Where if the leaders instead could take a more collaborative community approach, not try to be the experts and the ones to have to make all the decisions without consulting all these stakeholders, that actually some of that trust could be rebuilt at this point. But I think we've got societal-level shifts happening, so we've got to be aware of all that that's going on too.

Definitely. And sticking with Starbucks for a second here, the patrons of Starbucks are not technically a community, but I think— and I'd love to get your thought on this— if you go to Starbucks, you have to learn a whole new language. You have to understand that a tall is actually a small. You know, it's like, what? That's kind of weird. So they have this own language that Starbucks has essentially created that if I go to Caribou Coffee, it's a different language, okay? It's like, I know I'm either in or I'm not in. So tell me how that relates to building a community in terms of, there has to be some way to know that I'm either in the community or I'm not in the community. How do you think about that?

Yeah, so I mean, that shared language is what I would think about as like a shared symbol or shared meanings. And there's kind of, like you said, in-group and out-group associations based on whether you know that language or don't, or you have some symbol or you don't have that symbol. And so that is just one characteristic of strong communities, is that they have shared language and shared symbols within their culture of that community. So So Starbucks, from a brand building perspective, it's a genius brand move. Do they have a strong customer community? It's missing some other elements that are necessary to the definition. So if we go back to the very beginning of like how I'm defining community of a group of people who care about one another's welfare, do Starbucks patrons care about other Starbucks patrons' welfare? I don't know. I've been in some Starbucks where maybe that's the case and I've been in some that probably not. Definitely not. Yeah, there's not like this implicit kind of affinity. But they do have some building blocks there and more could be done. They used to actually have a program called My Starbucks Idea where they would let people submit ideas for like new drinks they wanted or like new cups they wanted Starbucks to, to create and things like that. And that was kind of beginning to create a little bit more of this. But still many aspects were missing of the community.

So we talked about having a clear— you're either in the group or you're not in the group. About maybe having some shared symbols or shared language. What are some other markers or, quote, requirements to really help build a brand community?

I'm gonna again reference my co-author Charles Vogel's book, The Art of Community. So there's actually 7 different building blocks of communities. And what you're talking about, the in-group, out-group, Charles refers to as boundaries. There's also the importance of what he calls in his language temples, or a gathering space, a central gathering space.. And so that's where digital communities can have a lot of power, is that you can create that central gathering space even though people are distributed around the world. You don't have to have a physical temple anymore. And yeah, there's a number of other, um, elements there.

And so let's talk about the online space here for a moment, cuz a lot of folks are building online communities. And I know there's some interesting data out there in terms of, and I know I've built online communities as well, and you find that there's a large percentage of folks that are just marginally interested and active. There's a much smaller group of people who are pretty active. There's a really small group of people who are super users. So what has your data shown and how do you think about building an online community and what are some of your best thoughts on how to create an actively engaged online community?

Yeah, so the numbers that I hold very dear in my work are, 80/20 and 4. And what I mean by that is, you've probably heard of the 80/20 principle or the Pareto principle where 20% of your inputs create 80% of the value in all kinds of contexts. And this is true in communities as well, that about 20% of your members in your community are contributing an outsized amount of value to the rest of the community. So they're in an online community context, they are showing up, posting questions, answering other people's questions, cheering people on, introducing themselves, DMing people. Doing all that work. And then within that 20%, there's a 20% of the 20% or 4% who are doing that, like you said, a really strong core of people who are going well above and beyond. It's maybe even part of their identity being part of that community. They're maybe hosting events for you. If you wanna do a gathering of wine enthusiasts, clients, it'd be like if you had 100 clients, the 4 who are gonna step up and actually promise to show up and do show up to these things, participate actively, welcome people in, all that stuff. That's what I see in my work at a very, very, very large scale. There's something also known as the 99/1 principle. So in really, really large communities, let's say for example, like eBay's seller community, 1% of the membership is actually, they're the ones contributing outsized value. And without that 1%, the whole community would come crashing down. And this is true at the eBay seller community scale. It's true at, you know, for Twitch and Twitch gaming, like their creators program, 1% of their creators, if they lost them, Twitch would cease to exist the way that it does today. And it's also true of small communities like 10. In my case, like looking at, we would be looking at about 4 different people. But even if you just had 1, what's important to keep in mind when building a community is that whatever your expectations are for people to show up and contribute, you should probably lower them a little bit because you're asking a lot from people. Their time is so very precious. So number one, make sure your asks are really, really good and valuable to people. And number two, just know that people's lives are busy and chaotic and they're gonna show up when they can and it's not gonna be a fit for everybody. And that is by design. So I think that's really important is that we give ourselves lots of grace there, that success does not look like everyone showing up, everyone participating, ever. It never looks like that.

Yeah, I read something one time about when a Hollywood studio was reviewing a new show and they do a focus group. What they're looking for to determine whether or not this show is going to work is they don't want 90% of the people in the focus group to give it a 7 out of 10. What they want is like 10 or 15% of the focus group to give it a 10 out of 10, and then the rest, maybe it's just middle of the road. Yeah. And even better, they want another 10 or 15% that just hates it. And so by having a core group of super enthusiastic people that's going to be enough to spread the word. They're going to voluntarily take their time to go on social media and talk about it. And then the people that hate it might do the same thing, but it's going to cause people to want to watch it because there's people so strong on either end. So the worst thing you could do is have a show that everyone likes it, but nobody loves it, because it's going to go nowhere. Yeah. And I was having a conversation just last week with a gentleman who has a— I'll call it a community, of 1.7 million people. They have an online service and they've got 1.7 million people that have been through their program in one form or another. And I was asking him about, well, how actively involved are these people? How often do they go back and go through the training and watch the videos and all that stuff? And, and just like you and I are talking, it really follows that Pareto principle or the, you know, the 80/20 rule or the 99 and 1 rule. And so as I was talking to him, I was telling him, I said, look, you might want to consider not optimizing for 80% of the $1.7 million. Really figure out the top 1%, the top 4%, the top 15%, your super users, and really optimize their experience. Because if you can double the number of those people, you know, you're going to quadruple your business just because they're going to spread the word. So I don't know if you'd agree with that, or what are your thoughts Yeah, I definitely agree with that.

And the other thing, not only can they potentially become advocates for the business, but they're going to go on to create things or respond to people in such a way that it's going to create trickle-down value for everybody else in the community. Because you're always going to have what in community terms we call lurkers. Lurkers in your community, those are those who just kind of watch and see what's going on. Maybe they only log in once a month, whatever it might be. Lurkers are still going to get value as long as there's things are actually happening. In the online community. But if nothing's happening in there and you haven't nurtured that top 20, top 4% of people, then even your lurkers aren't going to get value. So it really is about focusing on that core group because whatever they create, whatever they participate in, all of that is going to create value for everybody, even those who can't be actively involved or don't want to be.

Let's talk about the leader of the community for a moment. So again, going back to financial advisors for a second here, Financial advisors obviously deal with money, and financial advisors are human, which means they probably have a quirky relationship with money. So they bring their own biases into the relationship. Hopefully they're a little better at understanding what those biases are so they can be aware of that and do a good job advising their clients without having too much of a bias there in a negative way. But they're going to have something. So in a similar way, the leader of a community, how do you think about how the community leader needs to show up and the impact that they have with any baggage or biases that they bring? How is that going to affect the nature of the community that they're building?

That is a fantastic question. And the answer is that it's everything. It's everything. Who you are as a leader determines the community you can build.. And what that means is that a lot is going to come up emotionally, intellectually as well. But emotionally, a lot comes up when you start gathering people because we all have stories. We always have money stories. We also have stories about connection and friendships and what all that has meant to us as children growing up, you know, being teenagers like myself, having trouble, like having deep friendships. All of that comes up. When you start gathering people. And so it's really, really important to give yourself— again, I'm gonna use the word grace. I use this word all the time. Give yourself grace in knowing it's gonna bring things up for you. Process them. That's why it's so important for community builders to know other community builders. So if, uh, you don't know anyone else gathering people, go to some gatherings yourself and meet some other leaders so you can talk to them about what you're doing. It's a continual process, the continual learning. I've been doing this work for over 15 years. I'm still having revelations all the time about ways in which I hold myself back, ways in which I, you know, make other people's stuff about me and have to, like, work through that and process that. And I've definitely gotten better at it over the years, but it is a necessary part. It's the inner work of community building, and it's, it's a requirement to do this work well. Yeah.

And I heard you on another podcast, you had mentioned the book The Body Keeps the Score. Which is a book I read here recently. And I'd love for you to share any insights or how you think about what that book talks about and how that may relate to being a community leader and maybe shining a spotlight on our blind spots or some of this baggage that we may bring into our role as a community leader.

Yeah, that book by Bessel van der Kolk is, I think, one of the greatest books of our time. It's so important, so very important. What he's talking about there is how we store trauma in our bodies and how it can come out in strange ways when we're like quote unquote triggered or not processing or healing from what's happened. That's not a linear journey. We can talk about that at a different time. But I think that's so important because again, things are going to come up for you as you're building community and the rate of burnout among people who build community is very, very high. Similar to like very high burnout in the nursing profession because you're— I'm not comparing these. One is a life-saving profession, but the other one is a profession of deep service and relationships. And it's very easy to get burnt out on that if you're not aware of what's happening in your body, exhaustion that's coming up for you, like just feeling depleted, feeling resentful, feeling like you can't take a break, all that stuff. Comes up, you know, I'm a big proponent of therapy for, for people, whatever kind of therapy makes sense for you, whether that's talk therapy or massage therapy, I don't care. But you've got to be aware of what's going on in your body. And the more you can name it, the more you can become free of it as well. So I think that's really empowering. It's a really empowering journey to be on.

Yeah. And this, this might be a bit of a sidetrack, but as I read it, one of the things that really stuck with me was Again, getting back to financial advisors, is when the markets are down and volatile like they are as we're having our conversation here today, there's always a small percentage of the advisor's clients who just go crazy. "Move me to cash. I can't take it anymore. You know, I'm gonna lose all my money." And oftentimes advisors will try and talk them off the ledge by having a logical, rational, conversation about, well, here's what the markets have done historically, and here's some charts, and here's what happened on the past 20 recessions, and the markets always bounce back. So it's like this logical appeal, and sometimes that works, other times it doesn't. And as I was reading the book The Body Keeps the Score, I'm thinking, I'll bet the volatility of the market is really triggering other issues, okay, that's coming to the forefront, that this volatile situation, there your portfolio being down is triggering. And so no amount of logical, rational talk is going to get them to overcome that. And so now, obviously, that's a very delicate issue, and there's only so far that a financial advisor can go if that truly is bringing up some past trauma. Okay, so that's, that's a whole different area, and most advisors are not trained to deal with that, and they have to refer that out. But I love the book I recommend the book just like you have. I think it has a lot of applications, and it helped me better understand how people react to things when I think, how in the world could you respond that way? Or how in the world could you think that? You know, and it gives me a little more empathy, I think, for— and you say grace, I think that's a great word. It's like, just hold some space here for them and try and understand, well, maybe based on their background and where they're coming from, that is a logical, rational reaction to a volatile market, and this is how they're expressing it, right?

Yeah, you have no idea. I mean, and you might if you get to know them better and have that deeper relationship with them, but then you also have to know where's your boundary, because you can't heal someone else's stories around that. Um, but what you're making me think of too is how a lot of what that book gets at is the fact that we can't We can't heal alone. We can't heal in isolation. And in fact, what trauma does is it isolates us. People with extreme post-traumatic stress disorder feel inhuman. They don't feel like human beings. And so building community and making sure people feel like, hey, we're in this together, we're all feeling all kinds of things and we're here. And we also don't have to talk about that. You know, like, let's take a break and talk about wine for a little bit because wine's still good. I think that's really, really important because I think a lot of us are trying to like self-soothe and self, you know, kind of talk ourselves or rationalize ourselves through what's going on in the markets, and that's never gonna ever gonna work. And so sometimes we just need to be in relationship with other people, and that's part of the solution. It's not going to fix things, but it is going to make us feel better, and that's going to help us make better decisions, right?

And, and like I said earlier, there's never a bad time to be in community. And this is really the second episode that I've done here for Barron's on talking about community. The first last one I did was with Jon Levy, who wrote a book called You're Invited. We touched on the community aspect. So I just think it's so important. And that's why when I saw your book come out, I really wanted to get you on the show here, because I think it is so important, whether it's building a community among your employees, which really will deepen your culture, whether it's creating groups of your clients around common interests and building that community. I don't think there's any downside to doing that. It'll certainly take some effort, but I think there can only be positive outcomes from that.

Absolutely.

Never a bad time. I'd also love to hear about communities that you're in. So I'm assuming that not only do you lead communities, but you're also in other people's communities. So I'm thinking you probably have both sides. So share a little bit about your perspective from both being a community organizer as well as a participant in other people's communities. How do you see from those two perspectives?

So interesting, because when I was in the first years of doing this work, actually building a community builder made me an intolerable community member. Like, I was just so, you know, picking out all the things that were wrong or the things that could be done better. And now the more that I've matured into this work and done so much of it myself, I'm going to use the word grace again. I have so much grace around all this because there is no perfect gathering. There is there's no perfect community leader, there's no perfect community participant, and what works one month might not work the next month. It's all always changing. And so I think it's just made me really patient with anyone who's willing to do the work, the hard work of bringing people together. And I also think it's made me really excited anytime I see an organization or any kind of leader step up and say, hey, I'm going to bring people together, whether that's around political advocacy work or a local restaurant or whatever else it might be. I just get so excited because I see someone stepping out on a limb. I know it takes courage, and so I want to be there and cheer them on and root for them. Yeah, it's just made me so grateful for all the people willing to do this, truly.

Now, you mentioned politics, and I think you did some work in a political campaign. I did. Yes. So this is not a political show, but if it was, we probably would have a whole lot more listeners because we could be really controversial and get people riled up. But I'd love for you to share any insights that you have, say, in a political environment in terms of building those groups or those communities. And this is not a left versus right or Republican versus Democrat kind of thing. It's just talking about the community itself and how our political organizations organizing around communities? What are some of the practices that you see them doing for good? And then maybe if they're using them in evil ways as well, if they are.

Would love your thoughts on that. Yeah, so elections are won and lost by the power of the communities that are built around candidates or issues, period. That's how things have been going on like that for years, but it's even more so true. I mean, really, the, the turning point that we've seen in American politics is the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign when he and his team built mybarackobama.com. And they were able to bring together all these people all over the US and the world digitally as well as in person and really focused on growing grassroots efforts in each local area. Now, the way the campaigns have been run since then has changed drastically. And it seems to be changing just even in this current midterm election cycle, like on a regular weekly basis. That is something that people who are leading campaign teams are thinking about all the time is how How do we resource our top advocates and resource our local leaders so that they can go on to talk to other people and bring people together around the issues that matter to our candidate? I don't want to use an exact candidate's name here because I want this to be apolitical because it's happening on both sides. It's happening on both sides. It's like, how can we find someone, let's say, here in Milwaukee who is already a leader in their local community who we can give the tools to, who can then start to bring this out to their local community and, like I said, run events, do phone banking, hold phone bank events, like put these things together. It's just so, so important. And it's very difficult because people are becoming more and more disillusioned with the whole process, I find. But that's why it's just even more important for these candidates to have community builders on their staffs that can identify leaders and train people. And get them out in the field working and getting the vote out.

And again, I, I don't want this to turn into a political show, but I just think there's so many lessons to be learned about what happens in the political environment and how that applies to so many other areas. And of course, we all know we're a very polarized country right now. And how have the political parties been using the idea of separating into communities for political gain. I'm not interested in the political gain aspect, but just the technique of how they've applied certain techniques to try and get people to be part of the red community or the blue community or the purple community or whatever color community you want. It's like we've got certain symbols or we've got certain litmus tests that you have to pass. I mean, how do you think about that? Any lessons we can learn from what's happened happening in that area that might apply to other communities outside of the political sphere?

Yeah, I mean, there's so much we could talk about here. It's, it's fascinating because if you look at— so we're polarizing, you know, if you want to talk about American politics, like blue and red. But actually what's happening is we're like blue and then all these like sub-communities, and then red and all these sub-communities, and then ones that don't fit in either, and but they get lumped into each other. Like, and so what's happening is is not even necessarily polarization, but just increased segmentation and niching down of people actually starting to live in these kind of bubbles around their communities and maybe over-identifying with some of the communities that they're part of. This is dangerous for democracy, truly, to have all of these segmented communities out there with leaders who have various intentions, some pro-social, other ones very much antisocial and, and frightening for those of us who, you know, like research and learn about this stuff. And we have no control over who can and can't lead. That's the power of the internet. Anyone can lead. And so it's a scary thought. And that's why it's so even more important and why I'm even more grateful when someone steps up to lead with these good intentions of like uniting us of making sure that we have access to resources and information that we need. We need a counter effort to all this stuff that's going on, the more nefarious community building that's going on. Because if we were to look at this kind of as a war, I would say the nefarious players are winning the internet right now, and we've got to organize some kind of counter effort.

And to your point about sort of the— call it the negative forces, because that's a super powerful attractor. You know, the negative force field, so to speak. And just a couple of thoughts as I think about the power of community. I think the political side sphere really helps point that out. One is just the power of building a community. And politicians have really leveraged people's desire to be part of a community. So I think that's a key thing. And of course, that applies to any community build. But then the second, we talked earlier in the beginning of our conversation really about the loneliness epidemic that has been here for decades. It's like people want to feel like they belong to something. And again, that's why I love communities, because people want to belong to something. And I think many of the people listening to this are in positions to create communities for good, a force for good. And that's why I've done a second episode on this, because I want to really hammer home that point of how we can use these as a force for good. So this has been great. I appreciate this. And Carrie, are there any other thoughts, comments, observations that you want to make here that we haven't talked about yet?

I just say all my respect to you for really impressing the power of community and the importance of it, um, in an area that I actually have not heard about that much around financial advisors. So I think there's a huge opportunity here, just a open space. If other people aren't doing it, why aren't they doing it?

And why not you? Excellent. All right, so two final things here. One is, what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

And tell us about the book. Yeah, so the best way to connect with me is through my website at cariemelissajones.com. I'm also very active on Instagram at cariemelissajones. Um, and you can find the book Building Brand Communities by myself and Charles Vogel at any bookstore that you enjoy.

Okay, so here's the final question, and this is a question that came from a previous guest, and they had no idea who I was going to ask this to. So their question is, if you were not in this business— and in your case, the business of brand communities, author consulting, training that you do— if you were not in this business, what would you be doing right now, and what would your life be like?

Wow, that's a big question. I'm like, I have 5 different answers. I'll go with the more fun answer, which is that I have always been an entrepreneur. And I actually for a while had run a small bakery called South by San Francisco where I— my family is Southern. And so I had adopted old Southern family recipes with San Francisco Bay Area ingredients and made pies and other baked goods. And that could have been a whole pathway for me. So if I weren't building community, I would be making food for people, which in a way is is also still building community.

Well, yeah, you're making food for people by building those communities for sure. So great. Okay. Well, Carrie, this has been fantastic. I appreciate it. And thanks for being on the show. Thank you. I think you can tell I'm a big fan of creating communities and being in communities. We all want to feel like we belong to something where there's mutual care and concern. And Carrie's story of overcoming From surviving some very difficult teenage years filled with depression, anxiety, and traumatic stress to becoming one of the country's leading experts on building communities is a testament to the power of community. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at Barron's.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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