Engaging with your community For Dummies = Be Trustful (6/10)
Sharing and requesting collaboration are two major points to always keep in mind when you’re developing your social media strategy. But the tipping point to leverage your community is to be consistent and follow the editorial line you’ve set up as well as focusing on how you want your community to help you. And to be sure your community would help you in the tasks you request it do, you need to be trustful. Easier said than done? Some advice to make sure you would keep on being trustful to avoid any backfire from the community you empowered.
To be trustful be crystal clear about your objectives. If it’s about keeping your permanent point of contact with your customers (through a blog, a newsletter, a website news feed, or anything you think of), clearly explain your point using the “About this [format]” to share it. Don’t use the about page as the credit page, contact page, nor the brand history page (create differente pages that you can connect with each other if needed, but think first about the user experience you’re building).
In that about page, leave your readers and community members an opportunity to share with you their point of view (using an email link for example, but always show the email goes to a specific person and not a “opinion@yourbrand.com” email, and get sure that specific person send a reply or if too many emails write a post to explain to all the contributors). That’s also a way to get ideas, and then maybe move your objectives when the suggestions match your needs or are interesting. Sharing the tool objective gives you 2 rights on the community: first you’re right to close an off topic, redirecting people to the right place (at least to the contact page) or explaining why and referencing to your about page, and second you can request specific advice, feedbacks, or ideas.
To be trustful be engaging and help people with their problem, requestsn and ideas to generate the best user experience your customers and users can get from your products/ services and brand. From your customer care section take the more popular questions/ issues and explain clearly how to deal with it (think about a screencast of the way to use the product or to set up a service, or any way to visually explain how to get rid of the trouble) and also provide with ideas, tips, tweaks to get the best from your product (first think about who from your community sent you tips and ideas to use in a non usual way your service and link to him or highlight him/ her). You’d be adding some more stickiness and loyalty from your community to be part of it.
Last item to show you’re trustful to your community, share with them results of any requests and activity you requested your members to get involved. It’s called “give and take”. For example, from people collaborating to a survey about the product debug, create an entry to thank people and make sure the members having generated the most valuable content get notice of that (sending a goodie, a T-Shirt, an email is always welcome if no goodie).
Added to the trust item is the transparency, or at least driven transparency the company has to put in front of the community. Item we’d be speaking of in Rule#7: Show your company culture and mindset.
