Community + leveraging = You have to lead or fail

Leveraging the global brain is one of the objectives of the community creation: generating more ideas, more information, more feedback, more insights, and ultimately sparing time and money in the process. And Loyalty and increase of the purchase cart are consequences of the community management. But to achieve such results the community has to be lead and set to answer results. Otherwise all your efforts would turn into a short term and non business focus content, and eventually misunderstanding between the community and the brand hosting it.

Creating a community to host and discuss with your consumers and customers is one thing. Interesting, generating opportunity to connect with them, and raising interest from your customers in your brand. But letting the community live by itself isn’t what they’re expecting from the brand. And if no lead, they’ll take it and ask for things you don’t want to hear into your community, such as support request (you should have it redirect from the start on your customer support), free access or free stuff, coupons and other short term information that don’t generate value nor loyalty, but for sure stress for your community staff and negative opinion from your customers since you’re not providing any answer to those requests (or only “I can’t”, which is definitely not enough).

If you don’t want to enter that kind of game, set objectives and reason to be to your community: innovation, feedback, product test, information sharing on your business market, and other topics are relevant. They’re creating traction for people looking at more and more interaction with their brands, and then loyalty when you’re able to leverage the content they’re sharing to enhance the product, their user experience, or provide them more reason to keep on buying your products/ services.

Stick to your plan and make your community manager provide you frequent reports on how he does to get information on what you need from the community. That would costs you some stimulation budget but far less than having many focus groups on one single issue, which would then conduct to more focus groups to answer questions that would come out from the previous ones.

Photo Credit: Ìllume

To read more on that topic:

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