Engaging with your Community for Dummies = Highlight your best community members (5/10)
Generating people interest by sharing your opinions and requesting people to participate makes your company closer to your customers and prospects community. It also enable your ability to ask them for help and their collaboration when you need it. And more important that gives you the opportunity to turn your community members into a valuable asset for the brand. The next step is then to know how to keep leveraging that state while leading your community and welcoming new brand advocates and ambassadors. Here are some ways to do so.
Many options have been tested to make people comfortable with your brand. We can list in the options providing people with goodies, insider news, or sending valuable gifts, or inviting people to meet you. Though those ideas are interesting and reward people for their collaboration, they miss one important point: ego. Ego is the stamina for people to keep on “working” for you and you need to take that item into account when leading your community.
To aim at the ego there’s no need to request to your boss a large budget, paying or rewarding people for what they’ve done isn’t aiming at their ego. But blessing them for what they are to the community, highlighting their activity and what they’re doing by themself are more valuable to people. For example: instead of creating a contest to drive traffic with a big reward, write a post or an article (maybe a press release, in the following case, that would definitly interest websites and magazines) to highlight one of your most valuable customer/ user who has created or done something amazing for the community (speak about the community, not your brand). You show then you care about your community and know what’s happening in it. Moreover you’re providing content to journalists and bloggers that they can easily share with their readers.
Something else that is interesting is to help people create an event, and provide them with your help (not always by sponsoring but by providing visibility to your community). And if nobody’s doing anything for you, ask for people to do with a simple tweak: write a post (it’s why managing a blog is intersting) to spread an idea and ask if anybody’s done that already. If it’s a valuable idea, people would love to do it if never done, or would help the idea owner to continue doing it. That makes you a community facilitator, helping your community members connect with each other. And you then increase loyalty, people seeing there’s something happening.
Finally engaging with your community is all about creating content and lead the community to get itself stronger and closer. Don’t ask if you’re right doing it, the point is to iterate rapidly with ideas and work with your most important community members in stealth mode to be sure they’re alright with what you’re about to do, as well as requesting them feedbacks to balance your community management. And that’s what I call being trustful: acting according to the community while leading without breaking the hierarchy of the community. We would speak about that in the next post.
Photo Credit: Cico72b
ooopinionsss | December 2nd, 2008 at 9:20 pm #
How you think when the economic crisis will end? I wish to make statistics of independent opinions!