Owning the Relationship

December 24, 2020

Hey Everyone,

I hope you’re having a great Christmas Eve. You’re getting this becuase you subscribed to my newsletter at some point this year. (Note: If you’re not sure why you’re getting it and want to unsubscribe, no hard feelings.)

Heading into 2021, I want to get better at consistency in my writing and I want to focus in on an area that I’m growing more and more interested in, owned marketing.

On top of that, I’m not a huge fan of reading wordy newsletters (blame my short attention span), so each newsletter will be simple. I’ll curate a few interesting articles related to owned marketing (content, communities, customers, etc) and that’s all.

No fluff.

So with that, here’s the first issue. I hope you enjoy it.

Both journalism and commerce are realizing the growing value of niche communities.

“Niche platforms become valuable as they provide deeper insights on focus areas that larger but broader news organizations are more likely to miss.”

If you truly want to build owned marketing that can’t be taken from you, an owned platform needs to be a part of your conversation.

In order to have full control over how your community interacts and to retain ownership over all the content your community produces, you need to host your community platform yourself, or at least the critical parts of it, in way that you grants you access to your members, content, and data.

This HBR is packed with great insights on what makes customer communities tick.

In our work researching community-driven companies like LEGO and helping others to build communities, we’ve learned that true communities are more than groups of customers, they are groups of people who keep coming together over what they care about. 

4. Tweets of the Week

5. Random Links

Have a great rest of your week. If you have any feedback on this issue or want me to cover another aspect of owned marketing, I’d love it if you left a comment!

David