One of the rules in the SubangFood Community is that promotions aren’t allowed. There are times when this rule causes confusion and frustration for businesses, therefore I wanted to take the time to write an explanation on this position.
The current rule on promotions in the community is:
No promotions or spam
No advertisements, self-promotion posts. Any posts on businesses or for-profit events, posted by business owners or individuals related to the business are not allowed. If you’re a staff/influencer/marketer/spouse/relative/investor/shareholder affiliated with a business, please don’t post promotional posts of the business. If the post is about business A, don’t use the comments to promote your business B. Contact matt@subangfood.com if you need to advertise.
The mission of this community
While I haven’t had the time to put this out in public, my mission for the SubangFood is Build Community Through Food.
This has been the guidance I’ve been using when making decisions for this community over the last few months. It aligns well with my thoughts on the purpose of community.
Authenticity
To build the SubangFood Community, authenticity was needed, and one of the more important aspects of that was to ensure that self-promotions weren’t allowed. By not allowing self-promotions, we allow views and experiences by members of the community to rise through, which in turn increases the authenticity of the conversations, and fosters a healthier community.
Scale
The other very obvious reason to disallow self-promotions is the matter of scale. As the group has grown at a rapid pace and is now rather large, the issue of scale comes into play.
In the context of the Subang, if we take the assumption that there are a thousand food businesses in Subang and just ten percent of them decide to do one promotional post a day, that would loosely translate to a hundred promotional posts being pushed into the group on a daily basis.
This would not only create an incredible amount of work for me, it would also turn the community that we love into one that is full of advertising and spam.
It’s not foolproof
No system is perfect, and there have been several instances when I approved posts that should not have been approved. This usually happens due to misleading information being provided to me. I’m very disappointed when that happens, but it’s unfortunately unavoidable at this scale. That being said, I still continue to do my best to keep the community as clean as I can.
The downside is that I also occasionally decline legitimate posts. I wish I didn’t make such mistakes, but they do happen.
Free is rarely the answer
One feasible solution to control the flow and balance of promotional opportunities in the community would be to introduce friction and a barrier to entry.
Most of the spam posts happening in the community groups are because there groups aren’t properly moderated or charging for the commercial activity. When things are free and unguarded, they will definitely be abuse.
That would be akin to having a buffet with no entry price, the outcome is guaranteed to be chaos and an incredible amount of food waste, followed by the buffet quickly going out of business.
Balance is needed
A stance that disallows self-promotions may seem like I’m hostile towards businesses, but I’m actually pretty friendly towards businesses. I’ve been involved in various businesses over the last ten or fifteen years, and understand how hard it is to try and survive.
If I can provide some fair support to the businesses in Subang via the community, that would be good, as long as it’s done within a controlled manner. This also goes back to the discussion on equality, equity, and justice that I’m always thinking about.
As newer businesses start their journey in Subang, I’ve realised that sometimes their challenge isn’t that their food isn’t good, but nobody knows that they’re there. If the information can flow, then it might give struggling businesses a fair shot at survival, then the rest will be down to them on facing the many challenges of labour, quality, costs, and more.
Business that believe they want to sincerely engage with the SubangFood community can contact me at matt@subangfood.com and I’m happy to explore how we can work together for the benefit of the community.
Conclusion: Ever a work in progress
The more I learn about building communities, I understand and accept that it’s always going to be a work in progress. As the size of the community continues to grow, and the dynamics within the community evolves as the people within change, expect the rules, feel, activities within the community to adapt accordingly.
Mistakes will be made, but I’m doing the best I can to guide this community forward.