A Community Demands Humanity

TL;DR: Community isn’t some nebulous thing. It is real and tangible. Your content needs to feel reel. It has to be personal. Otherwise, your community won’t feel it and will never make the value-connection.

☕️ What’s the Danger?

It has been a little more than a year since Brian Niccol took over as Starbucks CEO. It hasn’t been all roses on his watch — one simply needs to search for “Niccol private jet” to get a sense of some of the negative press so far on his tenure.

But then he tells stories of Partners (the Baristas) who have leaned into his changes. In this interview with Semafor, he tells of his decision to add in and turn on the outlets. He asked, “What’s the worst that happens? People stay?” Imagine that!

His changes have helped to return Starbucks to being a coffeeshop and not a mass-market brand (which they still are), but that’s not their first goal.

😌 Make Your Content Stand Out

It is not enough to just post content on social media. (Truth: It has never been enough.)

My former boss (Gary Vaynerchuk) and mentor recently wrote, “By that, I mean that the biggest issue for big companies today is they make campaigns that are so generic because they’re trying to capture it all.”

Campaigns are meant to make consumers stop and think. Take action. Picture their future with your product / service.

Your content needs to act as a stake in the ground from a Knight, not a troll.

🐶 The Metaverse Has Joined Pets.com

Pets.com of the original Dot Com bust didn’t lose $80 billion, but that’s Meta’s loss on their Metaverse. They announced this week that they will be turning off their digital world permanently.

When this all launched and the damn broke on this concept, I wrote, “You likely have something real to share with your customers. Do it. Share it. Make it real. Ensure they can experience it. Let them smell it. Sense it.” I stand by it. Our worlds are too digital as it is. We need it, but we also need the human experience.