Co-creating Business With Your Community: A Conversation With Vincent Boon
Vincent Boon is a giant in the community space. A natural community leader, Vincent initially saw the power of community when hundreds of people began to show up to learn to play poker at his London meetup.
From there Vince went on to build pioneering communities in the gaming space, and create a fundamentally new model of community-powered business at GiffGaff.
In this episode, Vince talks about his early days in the community space, what it was like to develop the GiffGaff model, his work as Co-Founder of Standing on Giants, and his new company, Giants Technology. The second half of the podcast is devoted to a discussion about his recent article "Six Key Principles to Building Healthy & Positive Communities".
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Key Quotes From the Episode:
Learning About Virtual Communities from In-Person Communities
"In my spare time, I set up the London poker meetup. That was to basically teach people the basics of playing poker. It started off with three other guys and eventually had about a hundred thousand people joining it. We were taking over complete pubs in London. Literally incredible and it was really fun.
As I was doing this I was also the working on a (video) game. I said to the team "look guys, we have a whole bunch of fans out there that I'm sure would be love to see early versions of our games. It was so long ago that they'd never done this before. So I convinced the team to say look, let's just do a closed beta. Test and get our customers to test the games. We started off with a couple of hundred people eventually that grew to about 20,000 people testing this one game. We started a bit of a community as well.
And these guys started building a lot off of the leagues and the letters and newsletters and, you know, newspaper articles that could all be used within the game. So all of a sudden the game became a lot richer than it originally was intended. And, you know, when it launched, it was obviously an instant success because it already had a user base."
Building GiffGaff With the Customer Community
"We announced to the world "We're setting up this little MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator)and here is an idea of what we want to do. We want to run it with a community. We want to hear from people. We want to see what you guys have to say about what we're doing. And it started super simple.
We were also being very open about the fact that it's just a couple of people here and we're just setting up this service. If you've got any ideas, let us know obviously. When we were launching, as we were starting and plenty of things went wrong and we would just talk about that and you put that out there.
My view was always like, look, it's infinitely interesting. Whatever it is that we're doing. That's why they're showing up."
The Current View of Customer Experience
At the moment I think customer experience is incredibly flat. I don't have any experience with a website and how I go through that. I understand the whole route and the need to make it easier for me to buy stuff. But it's not really an experience with the company. It's an experience of how I experienced that product. That's cool, but it's not an emotional experience. For me, an emotional experience happens on a basis where I actually am in contact with the company. And that's not at the moment I have a problem."
Six Key Principles to Building Healthy & Positive Communities
Openness
” Just be open about what you're doing because your customers are interested. Let’s have the conversations in our house. Where I can influence them and where I can give an extra level of detail. Rather than they have no place to go.”Mutuality
”Understand the value that your customers can, can create for you and don't just take it as a given. If you have that in mind as a principal, to how you interact with your customers, I think, you say different things and you will look for different opportunities to talk with your customers.”Positivity
”It is about being relentlessly positive.That is very much around how we interact with our users and what we feel about them.” - Said another way, “Assume positive intent”.Education
”Educate don’t moderate.”Reward
”That's the whole mutuality idea of acknowledging when, when people do something that has a value and you can reward that by bringing them into the business.”Communication
”You are genuinely looking at your organization and saying: what are the different parts? What are we doing that would be interesting for our customers to know about? Some customers will be interested in certain things and will be interested in Everything. That has to come from throughout the organization.”
Resources From This Episode
Find Vincent online:
Vincent Boon on LinkedIn
@VincentBoon on Twitter
Giants Technology
Articles:
Six Key Principles to Building Healthy & Positive Communities
About the Cohere Podcast
The Cohere Podcast is produced by Structure3C and hosted by Structure3C’s Founder, Bill Johnston. If you are interested in learning more about the podcast, or submitting a topic or guest suggestion, please drop us a line at cohere@structure3c.com .
