The ultimate metric for anything on the internet is this: the health and prosperity of the communities you build. That is the point of the internet. It is the only point of the internet. It is the only thing it does better than the real world.

Every other metric and buzzword you know is a slave to this one.
And everything else outside of it is a waste of time and money. When you look back on your life, this is the only thing that will give you the satisfaction of success and legacy.

That is the greatest, wisest insight of “the millennials”. After all, it is just a form of one of the oldest ideas about the human spirit.

Haphazard, unfocused mass campaigns and grey hat tricks that give “results” are short-sighted, and have numerous x-order effects that make you weak and expose you to the wrong kind of feedback. Their use is limited to quickly breaking past the dumb– and occasionally malicious– algorithms that govern the web.

Healthy communities will stay together naturally and pay for like-minded services that help them thrive, without needing coercive advertising. A lone individual is likely to coldly shift to your competition at any point he feels like it, no matter what you did for him before. An individual belonging to a healthy community that shares your values is not.

Communities must have a reason to exist (so, cultivate your ambition), they must have a base of shared ideals and aesthetics (taste), and a framework of information (knowledge). Its members must have a similar vocabulary for talking to each other (intimacy) and dealing with conflict, competition and emotion (honour and kindness).

Groupthink is a sensitive dial: no community survives without at least some form of willing and happy conformity (fraternity and ritual) and without some sort of principled exclusion (morality). Without these, you will forever be in search of an elusive engagement goal.

It is a separate issue that the reasons they are together may be factually, morally, or spiritually wrong, and even downright criminal. Many of them are. If you chose and built it right, that’s a largely solvable issue. 

It is also a separate issue that communities will eventually stagnate and “die”. You can’t control that. What you can control: building it right will ensure that death is followed by adaptation, or an absorption of its constituent parts by other healthy communities.

Communities on the internet are usually some convenient, loose, spontaneous implementation of a forum or chat group. If it’s about business, most of the time the community you’re building is an audience, and often it’s also one you’re building inside your company. And when that happens, the two things will have to match almost exactly.

But you can’t immediately cater to the maximally large audience relevant to your idea. That is a Utopian web 2.0 dream. It results in fake friends and hurt feelings, fans and followers you cannot understand, data the advertisers you sell your space to cannot depend on, in an audience the creators and curators on your team cannot feel comfortable pushing the envelope with, and most importantly, people who do not feel comfortable being as vulnerable as they should be.

Worse, if the people you unwisely brought in to the fold don’t fit, then you vastly decrease your chance that an interesting, vulnerable person will voice anything on their mind. Because they know that whatever supportive messages they might receive, at worst, they will have to wade through the congealed grease of humanity to get to it, and at best, it’s completely useless.

Since I first got access to the internet 22 years ago, I have been a part of at least 10 different online communities on various platforms (including chatrooms) as an active member, probably 50+ as a serious, active lurker and occasional commenter and perhaps 100+ as a casual but engaged, periodic visitor. A majority of them are now toxic cesspools, ruled by narcissists, stereotyped and advertised to based solely on the flaws and fears of their loudest, worst members.

No business plan or hotshot consultant can save you if you or they are not world-builders, with at least a local vision. Nowadays, when I see this unwillingness and cannot foresee a way in which I can target it, including in my own pet projects, I don’t take it up. Even if I love the idea. It’s a waste of time and only breeds resentment. Instead I give free workable advice, during the consultation, if there is one.

“Marketing” in the modern world is 80% community management, and 20% messing around with poorly designed ad dashboards.

Even done right, it is often slow, slapdash and one-like-per-post till you finally hit upon your USP and secret sauce. If you’re managing a group, it requires serious daily engagement, especially in balancing between enabling the extreme openness a community requires vs. quickly shutting down toxic members. This is necessary. It hones your mind.

The reward for doing it right is a network that constantly creates what feels like unnatural good luck and serendipity for its members.

SEO has become a meaningless buzzword. The best SEO is: create great, useful content over time on varied-but-related topics interlinked across pages, platforms and mediums.

Don’t be afraid of niches. No matter what your business is: make a focused product. Concentrate all your content and marketing entirely on building a relatively smaller and strong community of enthusiastic or like-minded fans around it. Make sure some percentage of them are extroverts, and the rest are those who give feedback in good faith. Act on their inputs quickly. Rebuild entire features and products based on their judicious feedback.

The network effect will expand your audience for you, and your reputation with it.

Then, when and if you need to go big with the marketing, hire one of the big guns. If they don’t understand what you’ve worked hard for, fire them immediately, and get one who does.

If you read this whole thing and felt at no point that it applies to you, then your business shouldn’t be spending money on anything other than a nice website. It should be doing direct sales and networking. Which is a perfectly awesome thing to be doing, too. So get off social media.