Community & Social

Online communities matter way more today than they did years ago. They’re not just social anymore, they’re infrastructure. They're not a "place to go", but a "place to stay and grow".

Years ago, online communities existed as:

• Small and tech-gated.
• Mostly for hobbyists, academics, or early adopters.
• Separate from “real life” for most people.
• A set-it-and-forget-it solution.
• Reactive support.

Today, online communities are:

• Always-on and woven into daily life.
• Mass participation spaces, with two-way-street connections to Reddit, Discord, TikTok, WhatsApp, Slack, fandoms, gaming guilds, and other professional networks.
• Conduits to your product teams through Insight Engines.
• Places where people build identity, belonging, reputation, and income.
• The new destination where your classic "onboarding emails" send net-new customers, trial and freeware users for initial adoption & learning.
• And the big one... Connected Content! This is content that is synced across all possible channels to provide the fastest and smoothest AX (adoption experience) possible. 
• Proactive & predictive support.

What changed?

First: Enterprisers are becoming smarter. Period.

Second:

• Access: Smartphones and social platforms removed technical barriers. Almost everyone is in some online community now, even if they don’t call it that.

• Peer-to-Peer Safety: For many people, Communities are the first place they can be fully themselves. It is where they find context for their experiences.

• Corporate meaning: Inputs from customers come from many sources: sales teams, trade shows, replies to marketing & lifecycle messaging... But in today’s digital world, a company’s investment in Community + Social is its most consistent touchpoint with customers. 

• Stickiness: What users say in Communities can be archived forever, follow them across platforms, and shape their public persona. Likewise for companies, Communities are one of the top sources that information is crawled by Google and fed into LLMs.

• Constant activity. You know how they say that influencers stay influencers by posting constantly? The same goes for your community. If it is going to be successful, you need to staff it as if it's the Information Booth at the Smithsonian. Never leave it unattended. It will always have a line of people. Plus, your staff needs to become active posters and content creators. If they are only reacting or providing support escalations, then you will forever be stuck in support mode.

• Boost Onboarding Value by Hosting Adoption and LMS through Community. This one in particular is proving its value in the most tangible ways, and in 2026 and 2027 is likely going to see the largest adoption by companies yet. Why? Because it just makes sense. Videomaker Magazine and Education Weekly magazine have both stated that over 50% of YouTube users in the U.S. report using the platform to learn new things, with roughly 35% of all U.S. adults citing it as a key tool for self-education and "how-to" guidance. Communities are where a company can not only share these videos and learning moments, but can also control the message for future campaigns and messaging.

Making these strides will give you instant results. You will see an immediate affect on all of the things that contribute to responsible retention:

• Support Deflection
• Devaluation Mitigation
• Community-led deescalations
• product Loyalty
• Stable Brand
• Share-of-Voice
• More consistency in Tier-Based Customer Care

Everything comes full circle. Forums are back, and Community as a corporate concept has come back, stronger than ever. They're no longer the old fashioned, set-it-and-forget-it forums run by occasional moderators. They are now the #1 place for building trust and engaging directly with customers.

A community is where trust finds its mirror.

A well-run Community is a holistic, data-driven marketing engine that benefits every arm in the company. It works both vertically and horizontally to nurture long-term interest among current and potential business clients. Since nearly every engagement between a company and its customers happens in a forum or a social site, then that's where trust is also built. 

Examples: 

• Trust through osmosis: A user learns to trust the company by seeing how they treat other customers.
• "Kill 'em with kindness": Angry customers get de-escalated by interacting directly with the company's Community Team or Product Managers. 
• Support Deflection: A company's Customer Experience Team conducts social listening and works with the Lifecycle and Digital teams to proactively reach out to customers, intervening early to help reduce the number of active tech support tickets. 

For customers, a high performance community provides self-support. It helps customers avoid the need to create tech support tickets (90% of customers prefer this). they can browse the knowledge base, and find ways to obtain onboarding materials to learn the software faster. They can chat with peers and find up-to-date information on product news and software updates.

For the company, a well constructed Community provides: 

• SSO, especially between Community, LMS, and user accounts for products
• Data capture & sync to your CRM
• Support portal linkage
• Support deflection
• B2B/Enterprise tools like OKTA
• Security compliance standards and frameworks (it's not just SOC2 anymore)
• Stickiness of content for nourishment of the global message
• Federated search
• User profile notifications (which add to your eComm reach-out)
• Singular look and feel, allowing Marketing teams to scale their deliverables faster

Specifically, who inside the company benefits from these upgrades?

Sales Teams

It's Lead Generation, plain and simple. Especially since communities benefit sales in two distinct categories. 

1. Public communities like Reddit, Facebook Groups, and dedicated forums of all other flavors all contain lead-gen data that can be captured, segmented, and stored in your CRM. Though rooted in D2C, in routine EBRs this info can be added to the agenda for review.
2. Private communities for B2B (such as only allowing access with that account's email addresses) shine a bright light on expansion opportunities while also acting as a early detection mechanism for risk. So in a way, this is more for a CSM team that lives in the sales org.

B2B & Enterprise Sales Renewal Teams

Your renewals team probably lives in the sales org, but I would categorize it separately here because the workflows involved in retention and renewals are colossal. Communities, be them public to your general user base or private to your specific B2B customers and purchasers, are a lightning rod for predictive data. 

eCommerce Teams

Communities provide the big footprint. Got an eCommerce campaign that you've segmented for a specific tier of product and a specific subscription expiration window? Only using email to do so? Yeah... Add the Community and your rates of open/read/action can jump over 500%.

Marketing & Lifecycle Teams

You may have the best GTM strategy, the best onboarding materials ever created, perfectly scaled and segmented 0-30-day adoption lifecycle emails, bolstered by SMS texting... But you still need a community. They are where demand generation, user engagements, and trust are in an endless feedback loop.

Product Teams

Running a software or hardware company? Don't wait until the trade shows to hear product feedback. Don't browse reddit where most of the posts are complaints inflamed by clickbait providers supplying manufactured outrage. Host a calm, support-friendly Community and have representation there from your product team answering questions and making posts about future roadmapping.

Customer Teams (CSMs, CX, etc)

Modern communities provide secure, private communities for enterprise-level customers.

Building a digital-led customer journey through Community is a brilliant way to containerize all your hopes into one bucket. You can start small and siloed, but value grows as it permeates throughout the company horizontally. 

Chris Bove consults to companies that wish to define, design, and evolve their community strategies, ensuring every interaction adds value. This can be done both for the business and for the customer. 

I spent nearly a year operating at a VP level in Adoption & Enablement. For an industry leading SaaS & Subscription company, I created vision and strategy for Connected Content as a top-tier onboarding & enablement. One of the top components in its deployment and maintenance for all cohorts of customers was their Online Community. Through it, customers could flow seamlessly in their learning, from in-app messaging to tutorials to Knowledge Base articles to chatbot support.

Potential ideas we can discuss:

• Align your Community with OKRs in Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support.
• Connect it with your company's CRM.
• Add modern AI and automation.
• Finalize it as a seamless, engaging experience that strengthens the entire customer journey.

Who could use this the most?

• If your Community currently exists as a cost center, and has no profits attached to it at all, then contact me. 
• If your Support paths are broken or confusing, thus your Community has higher-than-desired numbers of incoming support requests from customers. 

No matter your company's products or current needs, our goal is the same: to create an ecosystem where your customers feel seen, heard, and empowered. By prioritizing the LAER (Land, Adopt, Expand, Retain) framework, we can ensure your communities directly support revenue, retention, and long-term engagements.