As part of a community you’re supposed to explain what you’re here for and what’s the purpose of your activity. If you’re questioning about the fact I’m telling “you’re joining a community” instead of “you’re creating a community”, the reason is simple: communities exist by themselves and don’t need you to create, but you need them to notice you, and the best way to do so is to lead and provide it with interesting content. Being aware of that state, a brand has options they have to select: acting not noticing your consumer pool and waiting for them to get your product if noticeable or sticking with that consumer pool and tune your business to echo the needs you hear and listen to. And all of that is based on your ability to show your culture and mindset to your consumer community and make them stick to you. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

Sharing passion, experience, and information are all focused to generate more stickiness and engagement between consumers and brands. That’s the first step to generate business leveraging social media efforts (we should be saying social networking abilities but “social media” has been generalized). Second step is to get benefits from sharing to bring people closer to your brand and by that generating opportunities to turn your “followers”, as we now say since Twitter, into customers/ fans/ admirers/ advocate/ ambassadors. But for each cluster of people you’ve appealed and make join the conversation, there are ways to turn them from listeners, contributors, word spreading facilitators, or just a passerby, into useful people for your business. Read More

Sharing passion and experience is cool and a natural way of thinking. But the last rule for engaging with your community isn’t that natural and may generate more questioning from your C-level, at first. Because what I’m calling information isn’t about your own company (it’s what I call experience) but about others. Others like your early customers, other companies that do great and give value to your products/ service, and about your business field. And that may become major part of your sharing showing you’re open to your business field and your community. Here’s how you can leverage that kind of sharing. Read More

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. Read More

As I was reviewing the post “Blogging + How To = Rules to make it works and more” where are listed 10 rules to follow to get started with blogging, I just feel like those rules weren’t written just for blogging but for engaging with your community, blogging being just one tool from the range companies can use to create stickiness and share values (that’s called brand values, isn’t it?). I’d be dealing with the 10 “golden rules” that are quite easy steps to follow (easier said than done though, don’t make me wrong). But please bear in mind that engaging with your community has no value if you’re not integrating it within a communications plan and connecting it with a CRM program. No value because no assigned objectives to your community, no value because no understanding from your employees on what’s the value added to that community or usefulness of people to manage that community. That said let speak of the item #1: share passion. Read More

Online community is one of the hard milestone of social media to reach. That may be the biggest deal for companies willing to join the conversation. Biggest deal, hard milestone to reach, but not that complicated. Indeed, to get it right, you need to think about some obvious items: what am I doing with that community, where do I lead that community, what helps me manage my community, and how do I turn my community into a tool to generate vibrant relationships with my community members and appeal my customers so that they join it. Easy answers to all these questions, but the real deal is actually to do it. As usual. Read More

Community management is a reborn issue brought by social networks and influential people. Prior to the social thing community management was limited to internal matters for brands, and social networks were only supported by businesses like porn, gaming, and tech. And that’s where it comes to be interesting to look at a bit of history. New socializing process born from the Internet invites if not compels brands to update their messaging channels (I voluntarily don’t use the term “communication” here since it’s no more relevant when confronted to so-called Web 2.0 social media), their marketing content (vs marketing message), and way to join the conversation (brands can’t start conversation, they’re too late on the web to do so). These different terms are important, they build a specific point of view that can help your brand develop the right community management strategy to increase your business efficiency. Read More

Stats show Facebook is still in the loop for being the place to be in consumer advertising. After being the hippest place, the still growing community (see the official stats here) is moving forward adding tools to make advertising efficient and targeted. Read More