Engaging with your Community for Dummies = Share passion (1/10)

As I was reviewing the post “Blogging + How To = Rules to make it works and more” where are listed 10 rules to follow to get started with blogging, I just feel like those rules weren’t written just for blogging but for engaging with your community, blogging being just one tool from the range companies can use to create stickiness and share values (that’s called brand values, isn’t it?). I’d be dealing with the 10 “golden rules” that are quite easy steps to follow (easier said than done though, don’t make me wrong). But please bear in mind that engaging with your community has no value if you’re not integrating it within a communications plan and connecting it with a CRM program. No value because no assigned objectives to your community, no value because no understanding from your employees on what’s the value added to that community or usefulness of people to manage that community. That said let speak of the item #1: share passion.

Sharing. That’s what communication means. If you don’t share, people would let you speak alone. Great job done if you were planning to make people leave. But if you care having people to speak with, sharing is a fine start. And if you want them to do more than listening to you, like feeding the conversation with personal experiences, ideas, sharing content, you should be showing passion on what you’re doing. In addition to passion, you have to share your experiences and spread relevant information, but that are the rules #2 and #3 that would be defined later.

Ok, sharing passion. How? Don’t speak of your product (?!). Speak of the world around you, not about you. So speak of what makes you (your company not your product) better than the other competitors. Help people stick to your style, your way of thinking and working. You have to create stickiness to obtain people climb the ladder of your business, from people to consumers to prospects to customers to fan/ admirer to ambassadors. To make people stick to your company and products, show what material you’re made with, what’s your points of interest, and how cool your company people are. But that doesn’t mean you can’t deal with some self-promoting, but take care of how you do it.

To do so, get for example Nike: that brand shares some worldwide values like effort, courage (see their ad on Courage), challenge, and sport in general. There are cheaper ways to share passion than Nike does (you don’t need to run $2million commercials), like blogging, photo sharing, video sharing, highlighting people you care for. It’s just about how you write, what content you share. Here are some interesting, and I hope inspiring for you, examples of what you can do to share passion:

• Innocent Drinks Blog
• Dell IdeaStorm (they do share passion of computers with consumers)
• World Of Warcraft community (sharing passion of the World of Warcraft realms and virtual worlds)
• DeviantArt: community platform to share visual creations (would be nice for Flickr to stick with that kind of community)
• SouthWest Airlines blog (sharing their way of working and culture, more on that on the rule #7 “Show your company culture and mindset)

The backbone of sharing ideas is to care about your customers as a part of your company. Make them feel comfortable with you and then you get a chance to generate loyalty. People may come for price but then stay for much more parameters. And just one more thing, don’t think all your customers would come to share, only those who are already engaged with you (whatever the level of engagement) or just curious about your company. Those people you have to care about addressing them the message they need to hear. And that’s the big part knowing what they need from you.

Next: Engaging with your Community for Dummies = Share experience (2/10)

Photo Credit: FiveAshes

To read more on that topic:

• Word of Mouth + Strategy = engrave it in your delivery strategy
• MySpace Music + Long tail = Indie labels not worthy enough for MySpace
• Brand Building + Social Media = Zappos Example and Employee Advocacy
• Engaging with your Community For Dummies = Key Takeaways
• Youtube + Hulu = Video platform challenge to generate business