Community + Engagement = How to create vibrant relationships
Online community is one of the hard milestone of social media to reach. That may be the biggest deal for companies willing to join the conversation. Biggest deal, hard milestone to reach, but not that complicated. Indeed, to get it right, you need to think about some obvious items: what am I doing with that community, where do I lead that community, what helps me manage my community, and how do I turn my community into a tool to generate vibrant relationships with my community members and appeal my customers so that they join it. Easy answers to all these questions, but the real deal is actually to do it. As usual.
To create useful communities, companies need to know why they’re doing it. That sounds obvious, but that’s one of the main reason companies fail to engage with consumers and make them join them. To go beyond that fact, think about that: why would you join a community you don’t know about, or why would you stay in a community in which you don’t know what’s in it for you? And don’t answer that’s because there are prizes to win, special offers, and all the traditional stuff companies send, thinking that would be enough to get people. First, that’s not creating any engagement with customers. Second, customers aren’t not here to get stuff (unless they’re here for it). Third, you’ve create a competitions community, not a brand community. Fourth, if no real engagement with the brand, users would leave because there’s so much fun out there on the Internet, and you’re no match.
When I’m speaking of “real engagement”, I mean including people into your company. Not as workers, but more as advisors. Consumers advisors to be accurate. People don’t need you to share ideas, experiences, there are many online tool to do, and you’d be burning money for nothing. But if you’re inviting people to your community to get their feedbacks, to request their user experience, to suggest enhancements, or brainstorm around next great things to do, you’d be matching their needs and they’d be willing to help.
After having set up your objectives, get smart strategies to reach them, here are some items you should think to get your community more interesting, generating vibrant relationships with your brand:
- Stimulate and highlight best people: you’re leading the community, so be the leader
- Get a community manager: willing to get return on investment? you need one person to work full time. The reason is simple, a community requests more than stats gathering. You need to care and create bonds with members. And a part time isn’t just enough.
- Target: don’t dream about having a huge community. Dream about having a community that actually helps you. And the more people you have, the more noise they make, and the more time you need to catch up with all the info your members are giving you. And they want you to care about what they’re doing for you.
- In and out: I’ve said you need to hire a full time community manager without any more explaination that “a part time isn’t just enough”. The reason is here. You can’t afford to create a community without speaking of it out of your company. I hear people saying “we prefer wait for a moment before publicly launching, in case it doesn’t work”. Then you won’t need to work on any public announcement since nobody would come. Get serious for a moment, if you’re dealing with a community, why don’t you speak of it? do you enjoy throwing away your money?
If after going all out the community’s still not working properly, don’t think it can’t work. It means you’ve not thought about your objectives (do they match with what people are able to do for you?) or that your strategy isn’t aligned with needs of your community (do they want to share about your product that way?).
Photo Credit: Chrissie White
