Businesses today have a website, multiple blogs, and use almost all social media channels ranging from Facebook to LinkedIn. But, how much time, effort and resources do they allocate to maintaining all these platforms?
Isn’t it time to do things in a much better and engaging way and then consolidate it into a single place?
Just imagine, if these businesses could bring their communities into their website effortlessly and incorporate a forum-style discussion for improving on customer service and user retention, eventually, and then just top it with graphics and videos, make events, control groups on its geolocation.
According to Forrester’s Research,
With an aim to socialise communities effectively, Glynk was established in 2019 and has taken off amongst the savviest set in the Silicon Valley of India, who recognise the potential of this hybrid offering.
In less than 6 months of launch, Bengaluru-based startup Glynk has received strong interest from major players like Nestaway, Rotary Club, IKP Knowledge Park, iLabs, Lodha group in India and NomadX, Citycentral.nl from Europe.
In an email interaction, Glynk co-founder Natarajan HK talked about various aspects including how the platform came about, the rise of private online communities, challenges in migrating people to this platform as well as growth projections.
Here are excerpts.
When did Glynk come into operation and what was the purpose behind starting it?
Glynk started out as an effective replacement for interest based Facebook groups and G+ communities. When brands running their communities on Facebook groups discovered Glynk, they reached out asking if they could run their community here. Complete control on data, users, reach and branding were their pressing needs. We then found that communities were being run even on messaging apps like Whatsapp, Telegram and Slack, albeit inefficiently.
Building a community was hard in itself. Using makeshift platforms was only making it harder.
Glynk was launched in early 2019 to help build community-powered businesses. Glynk was created with the purpose of making community building easy by providing the right tools to community owners and enable member-to-member interactions - a place where they can enjoy more control and ownership.
A few examples of private online communities
How will such private communities survive in the long run?
The future is going to be private in the truest sense. The goal of private communities isn’t just to be private and secure from other people. It’s to be private and secure from a platform, like Facebook or WhatsApp. One where data will not be consumed to show you targeted ads.
Private communities can make money by charging for membership, conducting events, putting up online courses. Brands use private communities to improve customer-to-customer and customer-to-employee interactions. This can bring down support costs, acquisition costs, improve retention - factors that directly impact revenue.
What will differentiate such groups from those on Facebook, WhatsApp?
A community thrives because there’s someone at its centre owning it, managing it, moderating it and ensuring every member derives some value, every day.
When chat apps and team collaboration tools are used to run a community, it comes with its own limitations.
WhatsApp was built to make messaging between friends and family easy. Communities running on WhatsApp have a problem of being spammy, resulting in most large groups ending up on mute. They also get lost many a time among too many messages.
Slack is a great tool for messaging between teammates to make collaboration easier but lack of profiles, member directories, events, and other important modules makes it incompetent to run a successful community.
There are so many things happening on Facebook that your group doesn't get the importance it deserves for the kind of effort you put in. Facebook’s algorithm decides who will see a community post and who will not, which is unfair on the community owner.
The people who are running groups on Whatsapp, Facebook, and Slack now realise that they deserve more and are migrating towards platforms that give them more control.
Safeguards these platforms will have, to keep data private
The future is private. The data will be owned by the community and used only to improve member experience rather than generate ad revenue from it. With strong laws like GDPR kicking in, it becomes mandatory for platforms to be completely transparent about how they will use the data. It can’t be hidden in the long terms and conditions pages that we never manage to read. How the data collected will be used has to be communicated in crisp, easily understandable language. There are security compliances that platforms will have to strictly adhere to and assure security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of customer data.
Glynk is GDPR compliant and is successfully catering to many communities in Europe.
What kind of smart platform are we looking at and how far have we progressed?
Managing a community is already a tough task - moderating content, creating groups, constantly adding people to it. We need a smart platform that does most of this on its own and reduces the burden on the community owner. The community builders can then fully focus on the creative aspects of the community.
With AI and Machine Learning, we have already been able to moderate content, especially images and videos, in real time. We are also able to rank posts based on the member’s interests and their likelihood of being interested in the post. The community owners can automate and schedule most of their actions. Platforms also nudge and remind the owners to take certain actions to ensure higher engagement. They also come with advanced analytics and insights, enabling owners to make better informed decisions.
In communities where the actions are taken, we notice that 95% of the interactions are member-to-member driven. The community manager has to do very little to keep the community running after a point.
How do you intend to bring about such people-focussed communities and create inherent trust?
Unlike online communities like Google+ or Facebook groups where strangers come together to discuss topics of interest - where it's all about the topic and less about people - there is a need for people who are already part of offline communities, to seamlessly connect. Trust is implicit in any private community. People will express freely once you create a safe environment which only a private community can provide. Only people who meet certain predefined credentials can be part of these communities.
What are your primary challenges in getting communities to shift to Glynk's platform?
It’s always a challenge to get people to move their existing communities to a relatively new platform. Migrating a community is no easy task. Most community owners are in awe of Glynk and agree that it’s a much better way to run a community. However, some of them resist or postpone because of the herculean task of migrating all members, especially in large-sized communities.
We have solved these by making migration a one-step process for the members. We also have a community specialist who works with community managers during the entire onboarding schedule to ensure a smooth migration by following certain practices.
Growth projections and expansion plans
By the end of 2020, we expect to host 1000+ brand communities across the US and Europe. These will primarily be coliving, coworking and club communities.
Plans for the Indian market
We see ourselves being the go-to platform for any community or business to truly engage their customers. We will continue to work with community focused brands in India, starting with coliving spaces, coworking spaces and clubs, who have people and community at the heart of their business. While member-to-member interactions will remain a core focus area, we have also enabled ways for members to interact with the business in multiple new ways. Buying event tickets, paying dues, booking meeting rooms, collecting donations and raising complaints are all part of Glynk's feature suite, making it a one-stop destination for communities - all under their brand!