How To Create the Friendliest Community on the Internet

or, Thoughts on Building a Digital Community

I’ll start at the end with a quick example of how awesome the results can be if you focus on community and then follow up with some overarching thoughts mixed in with some of the practical things we did to get there.

Our photography game was featured on Product Hunt last week and someone asked an interesting question that got me thinking a little deeper about a subject I already love talking about. Namely, community.

The question:

[…]How do you engage someone who’s score may be lower but you still want them to use the app and not feel discouraged? Tough problems to figure out, but I look forward to trying it out and seeing your solution!

At its core, what the question referenced is basically a messaging problem, and not unlike one nearly every company faces at some point. For us, we had to find a way to say, “Hey, this is just a fun way to turn creativity into a game and look at the world a little differently each day. Don’t stress out.” But obviously we can’t say that enough times or in enough places for it to be relevant at the right moment for the right person without putting annoying pop-ups all over our own product.

The only long-lasting solution to a messaging problem that is so closely tied to the core of your product has to start at the community level. In this case, if the message of fun and creativity over “performance anxiety” is baked into the core of our early constituency then SOMEONE will always be around at the right time to say what needs to be said.

Fortunately, we’ve done a good job of growing an unbelievably friendly and supportive community that accomplishes just that. Here are a couple screenshots from last week to illustrate. Fair warning: reading back through these comments they almost sound comically staged but I assure you these are real screenshots of real interactions that about 30 strangers had when one user got frustrated that they hadn’t won and said they were going to stop using Mission:Pic.

So how did we get here? How did we get to a place where an entire community is so friendly and supportive that you can’t leave even if you wanted to?

I’m sure luck has played a part but here are some things we’ve done and advice we’ve received along the way.

Guide Chaos

Model good behavior from Day 0. Even if you’re your only user. I like to think of this as the Chaos Theory of Community Building.

As Dr. Ian Malcolm so graciously illustrated, a community can grow in a billion different unpredictable directions thanks to tiny variations, and once the culture of your community goes off course the Butterfly Effect takes over. Before you know it, you’re sitting in a car alone talking about Chaos Theory and wondering what went wrong. BUT, the longer you can be there giving the community its early direction the fewer options for growing off course you give the culture.

Be there to tell the community when they’re doing a good job. Positive reinforcement (and positivity in general) are worth their weight in gold. Especially since they don’t technically weigh anything.

Under promise, over deliver.

This is a long one, and probably worth its own post, but it’s an important lesson I learned over and over again during my time at Disney. Most everything in life comes down to expectations and outcomes. If you expect something to be mediocre, and instead it’s great, you can’t help but be impressed. Conversely, if you expect something to be flawless and it’s only freaking amazing, you’re going to wish you had that two hours of your life back. (I’m talking to you, Guardians of the Galaxy.)

Some may disagree, but the genius of Disney, particularly their theme parks, is that they play a dangerous game and play it well. They set your expectations high, telling you that you’re going to have a magical once-in-a-lifetime experience and then they STILL over deliver.

photo credit: chris.alcoran

When you plan a trip to Disney, you’re focused on the rides, the atmosphere, you can’t wait to have your kiddos meet Mickey…and Disney knows it can deliver on that front. That part’s easy.

What Disney also knows, and what you don’t consider in your planning, is that they can also deliver in a big way by ensuring that every cast member you meet will greet you with a smile. They know that, at some point you might drop your popcorn and then you’ll be shocked that, 1) the mess is cleaned up before you have time to feel embarrassed about it and 2) the cast member who saw it happen is already making sure you get a fresh bag. They know that you might lose your hat on a ride and, despite having warned you over and over again on the PA, the operator is either going to shut down the ride to recover your hat, or make sure you get a new one on Disney’s dime.

You can’t even conceive of the thousands of ways something unexpected could happen to you that they practice on hundreds of guests every day. Your expectations don’t stand a chance.

The trick they’re pulling is especially powerful because people rarely set expectations relating to customer service. Or better yet, they DO have expectations about customer service but they are ridiculously low thanks to all the mediocre retail experiences we all have.

This is a view I’ve tried to bring to Mission:Pic. Obviously we don’t have as many opportunities to make unexpected things happen in your life, but we can look at what everyone else is doing and go beyond.

For example, Mission:Pic is a place to challenge your creative by turning photography into a game, which also means there’s a winner every day. As you’d expect, the winner earns a pretty little badge that they can look at in the app and share on social media. That’s how you meet expectations. Barely.

The winner also gets an 8x8 print of their winning photo, embossed with our first place seal, in a branded envelope along with a handwritten postcard from me. All shipped straight to their home. For free. That means we can WAY over deliver for one person each day for $4 and <20 minutes of my time and in the process build good will in our community.

People too often talk about the flipside of this concept. They say that when outcome doesn’t meet expectation, the gap is disappointment. But the reason this is such and important concept in terms of community building is when outcomes exceed expectation then that gap between the two is nothing but joy. The more joy you feed into your community the happier a place it’s going to be for everyone. And happiness, like any emotion, has its own inertia.

Love Your Family

Possibly most important, and you’d think most obvious, you have to care about your people. Your community is an extension of your family in every conceivable way you could stretch that metaphor. Sure, there are some nutty aunts and uncles in there but they’re YOUR nutty aunts and uncles, and if you treat them with kindness, respect and authenticity then they will always have your back.

Make every effort to keep your users up to date with emails or posts that are as transparent as possible. For us, something as simple as a “😍” from one of the creators of Mission:Pic on a great photo shows that we’re there and that we care.

Negative One Tolerance

As an incurable optimist who likes to think the best of people, in the past I’ve been pathetically bad at following my own advice here and it has only ever led to heartache. You know what good behavior looks like (on account of you’re part of your own community and modeling it every day, right?) so you know what it looks like when another user isn’t playing nice.

To revisit the Chaos Theory of Community Building, think of that user’s behavior as an ingrown hair that’s about to shove Dr. Malcolm’s water drop so far off course it drips right onto your crotch. Not only is your community culture off track but now you’re stuck looking like you’ve peed yourself. Personal and professional embarrassment just because you couldn’t make the hard choice of digging out a painful hair. Not worth it.

The End

This is honestly one of my favorite topics and there are a lot of my own philosophies that I left out for your sake. I’d love to talk more about it below or you can always email me at brett at missionpic.com.