Chris Writes.

One of the things we’ve been working hard to solve with the Specialized Riders Club is the globalization of the club: international markets are different. But regardless of location, because they’re all cyclists, a club member values two primary things: context, and geography. Context in that the information needs to match their interest and ability. Geography in that if something is interesting, but far away, it’s still usually not a viable option.

So, consider my home country of Canada. The USA-focused Riders Club does nothing to tell someone in Buffalo about rides in Niagara-on-the-Lake, despite the proximity. Similarly, someone in France might be spending the weekend in Italy, and completely separate clubs (while convenient from a business standpoint) are of less value from a use standpoint, at least in the opinion of the club member. So the internationalization then poses a challenge: it can’t internationalize the same way a product can. It must internationalize in the same way that the consumers do themselves! The fact that legacy systems don’t often support this pattern of evolution might help to explain why so few branded communities (not that there are very many) have expanded past the home country of origin.

And the communities that have succeeded globally have done so by offering less and less from the main office, and more and more from the community itself.

I realized recently that what’s happening with the Specialized Riders Club that gets me really excited has almost nothing to do with the size of the club. It’s about the activity. For better or worse, and for some clearly sensible reasons, the growth of the club has been a major focus for the company as the club turns the corner past 6 months of age and starts heading towards that first birthday. But it’s when *people actually do things* that I get excited. It’s not how many people are there. It’s whether or not people care about each other enough to actually do something.

A case in point: our first Riders Club trip recently happened. We had 11 club members spend their own hard-earned cash to join us on a trip to Fruita, Colorado. The trip was epic, a success by all accounts. But it’s success was not based on the number that attended – rather, it was the after effects. The stories that people told using the club site. The comments that were left by others who wished they could have gone. These stories that we can tell to a larger group make the entire club stronger. The community rallies around events, even if not everyone attends. It’s poetry to watch. And it has everything to do with relevance, and very little to do with the number of people who went.

So the heuristic: Communities should care. If they care, they’ll grow.