Your Marketing Team Is Spending Money on an Algorithm That Has Already Changed.

Insights from the Scaling Business Summit 2026, Ho Chi Minh City.

Bui Quang Tinh Tu, Founder of Envision Nexus, stepped on stage in the opening slot of the afternoon, the slot most speakers dread. He knew it. He opened with a self-aware acknowledgment that keeping a room awake after lunch is harder than keeping one engaged. He did not struggle. Within three minutes, half the hands in the room had gone up in response to a question about Facebook group engagement, and the conversation that followed reframed something most of the founders present thought they already understood: what community actually is.

Tinh Tu has been building communities since 2014. One of them is still active. It has evolved from an online group into a nonprofit with ninety volunteers operating across five cities, each with its own chapter head. He has also worked as CMO for GoWhee in Vietnam, held roles at Ringier AG in Europe, and has built community-driven growth engines for clients across industries. His talk was not a theoretical overview. It was a twelve-year practitioner's view of what works and what companies keep getting wrong.

1. Community Is a Medium, Not a Channel

Most companies treat community like a media channel, assign it to marketing, set follower KPIs, expect leads. Tinh Tu's framing is different: community is a medium through which you solve a specific business problem. The distinction changes everything you measure.

Two examples made this concrete. Notion power users built templates and automation guides sold on a marketplace inside the platform, some earning $300,000 to $500,000 per year. Those same users created YouTube channels and blogs that brought in new users, none of it paid for by Notion's ad budget. The community was the distribution. LEGO solved R&D and distribution in one move through LEGO Ideas: anyone submits a design, designs with 10,000 votes enter review, selected designers earn a royalty and 1% of sales revenue. One platform, two major business problems solved.

Lesson 1: Before you build a community, name the business problem it exists to solve. Follower counts are not outcomes. Solved problems are.

2. The Algorithm Gap Is 500x

Post to a Facebook page with one million followers today without advertising and approximately 400 people will see it. That is 0.04% organic reach. The same dynamic applies across Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Platforms have redesigned their algorithms to favor sponsored and recommended content over brand pages.

Community groups operate differently. Tinh Tu shared data from his own groups: between 29% and 55% of total members engage with at least one piece of content per month. "Compare this number, that's 500 times more." Inside a niche community, an engineer or a doctor who is invisible on their personal profile becomes an expert voice. Their posts get engagement. Their opinions carry weight. Outside the community, no one cares. Inside it, they are essential.

Lesson 2: Your brand page is for advertising. Your community group is for engagement. The difference in organic reach is not marginal, it is 500 times.

3. Why Communities Beat Individual Influencers

Vietnamese audiences are growing tired of individual KOLs, not because they are inauthentic, but because a single person's opinion is unstable over time.

"What if your brand ambassador says something in five or ten years that contradicts your brand value?"

A community of five thousand people cannot be silenced by one person's change of heart, bought the way a single influencer can, or aged out. Brands recognizing this are moving budget from influencer fees toward community infrastructure, not cutting influencers entirely, but treating a well-built community as the more durable, more trustworthy long-term asset.

Lesson 3: A community is harder to build than an influencer relationship and exponentially more durable. The collective voice does not change its mind or take a competitor's money.

4. Four Reasons People Join and Where Most Brands Fail

After twelve years, Tinh Tu identified four reasons people join communities:

• Opportunity (jobs, clients, partnerships)
• Social capital (being seen as an expert)
• Fellowship (people who share your problems)
• Knowledge (insider experience that ChatGPT cannot replicate)

Most brand communities fail on knowledge.

"What people want is the inside knowledge, the thing that even ChatGPT is not sure about. They want to talk to people who share about experience, about failure, about what they went through."

A community without strong people at the center will not retain members who came for knowledge. They leave as soon as the content feels generated.

Lesson 4: Design your community around at least two of the four pillars. A community built on only one will not hold when that single value fluctuates.

5. Build Around the Problem, Not the Product

The most counterintuitive advice: do not build a community about your product. Build one about the problem your ideal customer is trying to solve.

Tinh Tu worked with one of Vietnam's largest mutual fund companies. They wanted a community for investors. He told them it would fail, Vietnamese retail investors were mostly traders, not fund buyers. Instead, they built around the underlying motivation: good money habits. The results: over one million views across social, more than 13,000 group members in two years, and over 70% of content now user-generated created by financial experts who came to share and build their own standing. The mutual fund was the destination. The community was the path.

Lesson 5: Name the real problem your ideal customer is trying to solve, not the product you want them to buy. Build around that. The conversion follows.

The CEO Execution Playbook: What to Do Tomorrow

1. 1. Check your page's organic reach. Pull the last five posts without ad spend. If reach is under 0.1%, shift your content team's focus to a group.
2. 2. Name the business problem first. Not "more leads", something specific. Sales cycle length? Churn? Market credibility? The answer determines what kind of community to build.
3. 3. Pick two pillars you can actually deliver. Opportunity, social capital, fellowship, knowledge. If you cannot deliver real insider knowledge, find talk leaders who can.
4. 4. Swap one influencer campaign for six months of community investment. Measure engagement, referrals, and pipeline against the influencer baseline.
5. 5. Test the LEGO model on one product. Identify something members could co-create. Give them ownership and reward. See if the distribution problem solves itself.

→ Watch the full session on YouTube