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

Sharing passion is the first step in engaging with your community and creating stickiness to your brand. People do like to share values and points of interest with companies. And that’s the way they can become more loyal, and your way to incite loyalty and advocacy. Which is part of path to your CRM objectives. So you have a lot to win from sharing passion. And to nurture passion you need to share your own experiences (evolution of your business, how you got involved in your business area, what’s your history). Experiences of what’s happening, providing your brand with some more grip for people to stick with you.

First thing is to plan how and what you would be sharing. What for, for which objective, and how people would interact with the content you provide. Don’t go easy on it, we’re speaking of your your brand image and reputation building, but in a 2.0 style. 2.0 style because you won’t be sending information through press release, you’d be explaining your choices and starting conversation around your favorite topics, to develop and fine tune your objectives and way of working which would become part of your story. And that’s much more complicated than discussing and arguing about every word you’d put in a press release or about page for your communication material.

What’s the deal, how to achieve that objective? Share your non strategic business (but important) objectives and give your early customers a chance to add their own thoughts and nurture your reflexion. That’s how you’d be engaging them with you and start turning them into your first fans, maybe into your first brand ambassadors. Check with them you’re following the path they’ve imagined, tell them where you’re leading them, and if needed explain your choices. That would create conversations, bring more people to collaborate, generate word of mouth (not every day companies take into account what their customers are saying) and bring the first pieces of your history (or open a new chapter), as well as validating your gut feelings.

With a fine tuned conversation strategy linked to a well organized content management, you’d be quickly aggregating your community, rallying new people interested in the field you’re playing, and smart people willing to help your company because you’re doing differently (and better). That’s what I call generating stickiness. But the last required item to create the “chemistry” is the C-level or Senior product manager involvement. Without them being active part of this strategy (generating content, commenting, and nurturing the conversation) nothing interesting would come up. And no one would join your conversation, and you eventually stop working that way. The first milestone is then to engage with your C-level to collaborate with you.

Have a look on how Loic Le Meur from Seesmic is doing. He runs own blog, Youtube channel, and is a part-time panelist/ speaker in addition of beeing CEO of Seesmic. All the activities he’s been doing since he started that video conversation based company is to deliver awareness to his brand through his other activities. By asking people to share feedbacks on the product, providing people with news about Seesmic and evangelizing about video conversation and how it can be leveraged. Loic has fully turned into a CEO/ PR/ evangelist for his brand and then don’t need any tech PR since he has enough influence range to connect with prospects he’s targeted. But more than saving money on PR, he’s sharing experiences with his customers and generating stickiness and engagement with them. Which is the way to create a stong community to help grow fast the product and the business area.

To complete the rule #1 about sharing passion rule #3 would be about sharing information about your business area, providing your customers with useful tools and news about how to create a complete smart experience.

Photo Credit: Mr. Kris

To read more on that topic:

• Engage with Your Community For Dummies = Connect your efforts with your business (10/10)
• Engage with your Community For Dummies = Be consistent and Engage (9/10)
• Engage with your Community for Dummies = Bring the Insider Style (8/10)
• Engaging with your Community For Dummies = Show your company culture and mindset (7/10)
• Engaging with your community For Dummies = Be Trustful (6/10)