Engage with your Community For Dummies = Be consistent and Engage (9/10)
Once you’ve gathered your community around your blog, community platform, fan page (if you’re willing to use Facebook), website, or any other tool (Jason Calacanis is using a mailing list), the first step to leverage it is done. And now is the main part starting. Keeping on generating content and activities to invite continiously your customers and prospects to engage with you and collaborate in creating the best user experience ever. It means being consistent and innovative.
One tactic to do so is to leave the work to some of your customers champions, like Fiskateers and HomeGoods did, and being the company voice within the enthusiats people who are speaking about their hobbies and points of interest to deliver some important messages about contest or brand related activities. Another one is to stick with an existing community and provide with relevant content giving added value to it, turning your company into a community champion, like big companies do with their evangelists (like Microsoft, Sun, Dell, and others). Or do the minimum, providing users an employee to stick with (like Twitter or SixApart with their support people).
Those tactics are proven successful. Users and customers have a company representative to chat with when they need, a real one that can answer them faster than traditional methods, helping them to discover new things and get directed to the useful places to enhance their brand user experience. But doing so means being consistent and not leaving the seat after 3 months unless you want to give comfort to users and take that back when they’re becoming loyal and willing to be more than customers. Which may mean you’ll need to find a community manager or an evangelist to take that specific floor and be the customer representative within your company walls.
And to be sure that effort transforms to money in your bottom line, you’ll have to connect every of your social media effort, since it’s called like that, to a CRM program or anything being able to take into account your effort. The best being the CRM program since it helps you measure the loyalty rate and evolution of the purchase cart. And this is what we’d be dealing with in the last part: rule #10: connect with your business.
Photo Credit: ImmortalizR
