Flywheels and virtuous cycles (community activity → curation & commentary → content marketing)

March 22, 2022 · ooc-design

The most important influences on your OOC design are: 1 // What your members require in order to succeed 2 // What you can handle operationally (calendar, timing, etc.)

But one another factor (which often remains hidden until later) is: 3 // What your business requires in order to grow

For growth, the strongest option is loosely referred to as a “content flywheel”:

(mathilde’s thread)

Examples:

• Community Q&A/education events can be recorded, edited, and shared publicly as an podcast and video interview, and also as clips (i.e., everything is doing with Exploded Media)
• Interesting community discussions get collected and curated into permanent knowledgebase pieces that can be released as long-form articles
• When you notice a common or interesting issue/question/challenge, you can reply with a public piece of content like a video reply or article (i.e., treating the community’s questions as a content prompt for yourself)
• All of the above can also be rearranged as a email drip campaign, as Dru Rly does with the trends.vc newsletter, reusing the weekly industry deep-dive done for paying members (50k free email subscribers → 1k paid community members)
• In certain industries, member discussion/action/beliefs can be collected into a “statement about the industry from the X community” and used as a guest posting or resyndication piece
• Any of the above can be repurposed into a lead magnet, ebook, or big content piece

The idea is to ensure that a subset of your activities are doing double duty, working “live” for the private group and then also “afterwards” as public marketing.

(In my walkthrough, I called this “Virtuous loops of content marketing” (in the right-most column), but I’ll likely start using the more common “flywheel” label instead.)

Which creates a nice, repeatable, “boring process” for growth:

(rosie’s thread)

Of course, this must be done with respect toward the privacy and primacy of member conversations/progress — part of the magic of the communities is in their ability to create a “safe space” where members feel willing to talk about weakness.

I don’t think you’d be able to (or want to) repurpose all community content into a public flywheel. But it’s probably worth ensuring that you’re community activities are kicking off at least something that you can put out there.

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