8. The Kumbaya Effect: Social Media Marketing Builds Community
But participating in social media marketing can help your business cultivate a community of people who like you and are willing to tell others about you. The scale of success might be different than the promised, unreasonable expectation, but it is possible. And it’s not a concept that is beyond your grasp.
Think back to the communications and information hubs of the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries, particularly in rural areas. Where did people come together as a community for information other than religion? The general store.
These former icons of small-town life often served up everything from hardware to fresh pie and served as a small community’s newspaper, post office, and even bank all in one location. Was there community around those businesses? You bet there was.
You might think that the general store concept would never work in today’s world of big-box retailers and chain grocery stores. Add a little flavor and some community building through social media marketing, however, and you’d be wrong. Any business can cultivate and build community around its brand using social media marketing, and community building can be done in a number of ways. The process of building community is also not nearly as rigid and formal as you might think.
One example of a small business that quickly built community around its new, and all but unknown, brand is FAIT ICI. This local-focused, urban general store sits nestled in the not-so-small hamlet of Montreal, Quebec. It opened its doors in the summer of 2010 under the notion that products made in Quebec (the store’s name is French for “made here”) that promote an environmentally friendly and healthy food lifestyle would excite the local foodie set and beyond. But, like many small businesses, FAIT ICI didn’t start with investors, a financial backer, or even a marketing budget.
“We didn’t have a budget for paid media,” admitted Jackson Wightman, who we interviewed in March 2011. “So given some of the factors we were facing—being new, not having a perfect retail location, etc.—we needed to use some of the digital tools out there to get people to know about us and use our business.”
Wightman, who opened the store with his wife Lindsay Davis, used his experiences in marketing and public relations (his day job) to lay out a digital marketing strategy to launch FAIT ICI, well before the doors ever opened.
“I’d say 3 to 4 months out, we started actively listening on Twitter, looking at blogs in our space...ones that were talking about food, the environment, organic products...we were listening to people in those spaces well before our opening. We figured out who those people are. We tried to engage them by commenting on their blogs, retweeting their content, conversing with them on Twitter, giving them Follow Friday shout-outs, and so on. And we did that well in advance of the opening,” explained Wightman.
“When we finally did open and do our media event, a lot of these people covered us. And some people thought, ‘How is this little, new business getting this coverage from traditional media and bloggers?’ Our engagement with them helped us get attention and coverage when it came time to ask for those favors.”
Wightman’s insight into social media marketing falls squarely in line with the No Bullshit line of thinking. He recognized that one major hang-up small businesses have with digital tools is they mistakenly think they’ll pay dividends quickly. By focusing on relationship building and thinking long term, Wightman sidestepped a typical small business bump in the road.
He also approached social media tools realistically and strategically.
“All of our digital activity was a strategy...Absolutely,” he said. “We decided before opening the store to ask, ‘What are the spaces and tools we would want to be in? Are we going to have a Facebook page, and if we are, then why? What would we use a Twitter account for? What would we use a company blog for?’
“But we asked how they would fit into an overall digital strategy that would add value to people’s lives and build a community that would add value to our bottom line,” said Wightman.
So after nurturing relationships to help announce the launch of the business, Wightman used the FAIT ICI blog to enrich and expand the relationships, thus the community. He reached out to five Montreal area bloggers, inviting them to participate in a mini series of posts about food and the foodie culture in Montreal. The bloggers were so delighted to be asked that the sense of community began to evolve, even among a relatively small group of people.
“Then we took that idea a bit farther and thought, ‘Instead of doing guest posts two to three times per year, why don’t we create a group blog with a fixed life span and an explicit topic...52 posts by 52 people over 52 weeks?’ We approached more people—bloggers, journalists, chefs, big dogs in the community, friends, my mother and father—and said, ‘Look, write anything you want as long as it has a food and a Montreal angle,’” he said.
The resulting group blog, “ici et here,” which mixes the languages to say “here and here” has become a conversation point for the foodie and healthy lifestyle subculture in Montreal and Quebec. The effort is a separate and standalone website from FAIT ICI, but “brought to you by” the general store, which has created such a positive online home for the offline community to gather.
“We love Montreal and it’s a great food city,” Wightman explained with a passion typically offered by 12-year-olds talking about sports heroes. “We were providing a platform that not only engages influential people in our community, but one that tells the culinary story of our city in 52 weeks. It’s a cool thing. We’re the curators of the content, but that has generated a lot of earned media and a way to curry favor with industry and local influencers. But at the end of the day, it has brought us a lot of intrinsic benefit because we’re foodies who love Montreal.”
But here’s where Wightman differs from many hip and trendy digital marketers. Intrinsic benefit isn’t enough. This is where he becomes a true, No Bullshit kinda guy.
“PR folks often separate new and old media,” Wightman said. “But that belies the power of platforms like Twitter, which is one of the best platforms you can use to get traditional press coverage. It’s an unobtrusive way to communicate with many of the reporters who are covering your area or industry. We’ve had in the neighborhood of 30–40 articles and a couple of pieces of TV on us in the space of 8 months. An inordinate amount of that traditional coverage has come via a relationship we initially built and nurtured on Twitter.”
Notice the simplicity of how FAIT ICI launched? You, too, could identify influencers within your industry and reach out. You, too, could leverage a blog in creative ways to drive interest and engagement around your brand, which—at a minimum—produces a community of readers. In your case, it could potentially also bring an inordinate amount of traditional media coverage and foot traffic to your store.
Like Wightman, you can build community around your company with little more investment than your time. There was no complex social networking platform purchased and implemented here. FAIT ICI had no marketing budget. What Wightman and Davis had was an understanding that by being social as a business—by talking to like-minded people, media members, bloggers, and more—in interesting and relevant ways, they were building community around their new company.
One of our favorite bloggers on community, Richard Millington, captured the essence of why a company would want to put time and energy into building community in a blog post in December of 2009.1 In it, he wrote:
Imagine you own a high-end bicycle. The brand invites you to join a community of people who buy their bicycles. Through that community you make friends, share advice/tips for getting the most from the bike, and meet up several times a year.
Two things have happened. First, you’re locked into that brand. To leave the brand would be to leave the group. We don’t like leaving our friends behind. Second, your interest in the brand has been intensified. Your interest in a bike has become a passion for cycling.
Building community allows you ... yes, even the boring mortgage broker ... to create something that draws in people and makes them invested so much they can’t leave you. It won’t be about mortgages, but it might be about your expertise in real estate, home improvement, financial planning, or tangential topics that a reasonable person might trust a mortgage broker for an opinion about.
For FAIT ICI, it was a genuine interest in connecting with locals interested in locally grown and produced goods. For others, it can be more complex, both from the purpose and construct of the offline community and the technology driving their connecting point online.
Understanding Different Types of Communities
In Chapter 1, “Ignore the Hype. Believe the Facts,” we talked about the social media purists—the hippies and tree huggers—and how they do a great job of preaching community. The Kumbaya Factor was probably the only thing you heard coming from social media evangelists spouting from the first inklings of advocacy through most of 2010.
But 10 years after The Cluetrain Manifesto and 4 to 5 years into the social media marketing world’s life span, business owners started calling B.S. They wanted to see something for their efforts, but the community-for-community’s sake approach of early evangelists left that to be desired. But the purists were only half wrong, remember. The “conversation,” “engagement,” and “community” things were working. They just hadn’t yet added a focus on measuring and proving the value of each.
Several companies experienced large market share growth and even resurgence as pop-culture trends, thanks to efforts around building community. In his 2005 book Brand Hijack, Alex Wipperfurth chronicled the rise of Red Bull, the reemergence of Pabst Blue Ribbon as an underground cultural phenomenon, and the seemingly inexplicable evolution of Saturn vehicles, among other case studies. He explained how each of these brands earned market share and icon status by having their customers—their communities—hijack the brand.2 Also, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point explained the “epidemic” nature of Hush Puppies’ return to chic status in the mid-1990s.3 Whether manufactured or, in Gladwell’s terms, “tipped,” by a seemingly insignificant event or person, none of these hijacks or epidemics happened without the presence of a community around the brands.
Granted, there are varying degrees of community. Some are formal online community platforms with registrations, logins, and passwords, like Verizon’s Thinkfinity, an educational content resource for teachers. Others are just an informal network of people, like Pabst Blue Ribbon fans who dug the PBR. But the brand caught on, and now a fairly active forum community exists at www.pabst.com that features discussions on beer, supporting firefighters, and art.
The formal and informal examples of community building only scratch the surface of the possibilities, however. Maker’s Mark Bourbon, a former client of Jason’s, has a vibrant online and offline community called the Maker’s Mark Ambassadors. Each ambassador is officially registered with the brand as a member of the loyalty club, gets his name on a barrel of bourbon, and receives official, insider brand communiqués. Each spring, the members are invited to a special Ambassador’s weekend in Kentucky to visit the distillery, buy special bottles from their barrel’s batch when it matures, and mix and mingle with other Ambassadors, distillery staff, and more. And the Ambassadors are such raving fans of Maker’s Mark that they serve as brand evangelists for the product, even going so far as to buy drinks for complete strangers who might have considered buying a different drink.
Sea World San Antonio has a very different type of community. It mostly revolves around a 20,000-plus member Facebook Fan page. When fringe animal rights zealots stop by to post complaining messages on the company’s wall, its fans spring into action, inviting the person to go play on someone else’s Facebook page (see Figure 8.1). There’s no login and password or official company connection. These are just people who hit the “Like” button on the Sea World San Antonio Facebook page. (Compare this with what happens on Nestlé’s fan page, as we discussed in Chapter 5, “Make Some Noise: Social Media Marketing Aids in Branding and Awareness.”)
Figure 8.1. Sea World San Antonio’s fans leap to the defense of Sea World whenever animal rights activists complain on the park’s Facebook page.
The point is that the definition of community is fluid. Don’t think building community around your brand or company is about signing up for a community network-building platform, like Ning, and having a formalized, online community. In fact, your company already has a community. You just don’t know it.
To prove it, answer these questions:
• Do you have employees?
• Do you have current customers?
• Do you have vendors or other businesses you work with?
• Do the people involved in the three preceding items have spouses, children, or friends?
There’s your community. All you have to do is give them a reason, and perhaps the tools, to tell other people how cool you are.
There’s More to Building Community Than Just Making Friends
Don’t worry! We’re not lapsing into a raging fit of hugging trees here. It’s not enough to just find people who like you and make them tell their friends. Remember: If you add the word marketing to the term social media it’s about business.
To tap into the business side of communities, you need to approach community building strategically. You need to set goals, objectives, and measures for success. This enables you to put metrics around community building that make sense for your business.
The reason you might want to build community around your brand or organization is pretty self-explanatory: The more people you have who like you, the more people you have to (a) talk to and (b) ask to talk to others for you. Building community is basically a social media purist’s way of saying “building customers” to distract you from the sales part of the equation.
But in building this community of customers, you have to listen to that first half of the social media equation where the hippies were right. You have to be human. You have to engage in conversations. You have to be customer-centric, not brand-centric.
The fundamental key to being a successful community builder in the social media space is to change your marketing focus, ever so slightly, from focusing on sales to focusing on customers. Think about that for a second. It’s not about sales; it’s about customers. And no, they’re not the same thing.
To focus on the sale is to have all eyes on the dollar. You’re worried about the short-term transaction, making budget, hitting your numbers, driving the bottom line, one sale at a time. But to focus on the customer is to step across the line from transactional marketing to relationship marketing. You’re not worried about the sale that day, but rather on the lifetime value of that customer to your company. It’s okay if she walks out the door because you’re focused on the relationship ... the customer. She’ll sense that and come back.
If you’re focused on the transaction alone, she won’t.
This is the approach that separates Joe, the guy Jason buys his cars from, from other car salesmen.
Measuring Community
Salesmen like Joe can track their relationship marketing success versus their transactional marketing success. Good salesmen can say, “That’s Jason. He’s bought four cars from me over the course of the last 15 years. With his payments, service visits, and repair work over the years, he’s probably meant about $95,000 to us.”
The transactional guy says, “Just made an $18,000 sale!”
Although we wish it were that simple in the social media space, it’s not impossible to measure community building and even to tie some (but not all) of that activity to your bottom line. Looking at our potential strategic goals for community building in Chapter 1, we listed the following:
• Increase your number of fans, followers, friends, or readers.
• Grow your opt-in email marketing list.
• Increase the number of your affinity or loyalty club members.
• Increase fan-generated advocacy and promotion of your brand initiatives.
• Increase fan-generated defense of your brand in negative conversations.
None of these goals points directly to a financial outcome because the purpose is to build community. But you can focus on community building and weave in financial measures that support the justification for your efforts.
CareOne Financial Solutions, a debt consolidation and counseling service, did just that. The social media team there, led by Nichole Kelly, decided to compare its prospective customers who came to its online community from traditional methods (such as a television ad, direct mail piece, and so on) with those their social media marketing team contacted and cultivated as prospects. The team found prospects on the social media side of the aisle had a 179% better chance of signing up for a debt-relief plan than regular customers. They also found the social media prospects made their first payment at a 217% higher average than the traditional customer counterparts.4
Taking that analysis a step further, CareOne determined that when the social media team saw customers who had abandoned the sign-up process, then interacted with the social media team, the customers returned and completed the sign-up process at a conversion rate some 680% higher than those the social media team did not follow up with. Those customers also paid their first payment at a 732% improvement.
So the community here was measured in the value of the customer contact, not the amount of money the customer paid. Customers who were engaged by the brand were simply more valuable customers than the ones the company was typically focused on.
The more informal the community, the further from revenue measuring you’ll get. But website analytics packages can even delineate where traffic comes from and whether those specific users buy or convert on your site. Even though you might think it’s tough to measure the value of your Facebook page or Twitter following, you can use analytics software to measure how many people came, clicked, and bought from purchase point links you post to Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and other domains. This delivers you a value from your activity there.
You can even go ninja and use social share tracking solutions like Argyle Social (see Figure 8.2). By sharing links on your social networks using Argyle Social (or similar software), you can track clicks and traffic divided by site or source as well as assign dollar values to conversion points to prove a social revenue metric.
Figure 8.2. Argyle Social tracks the clicks on content you share via social networks and blogs using unique shortened URLs and then measures the number of people converting after clicking through to your website.
If you sell items on your site, place Argyle’s embed code on the “thank you” page after purchase, then tell the software how much the customer would spend to get to that purchase point. Then, in your reporting, you can see you made $10,000, but $6,000 came from typical sales, $2,500 came from sales generated by Facebook.com visitors, and the rest from Twitter.com visitors.
Of course, you have to present your Twitter or Facebook communities with clear calls to action and links to these purchase points for it to work, but as you can see, measuring community can be more than just how many followers you have. You can compare the value of your community members with noncommunity customers, measure purchase behaviors, and even purchase recommendations and referrals. As you will see in the chapters that follow, you can combine two or more of the main areas where social media benefits your brand and measure the cost savings or resulting profits from utilizing your community for research and development.
The key to placing value on what your company gets out of building community is in the planning: Set goals for the community you build and develop activities that persuade the community to deliver on those goals.
You Can Even Build Community Around Scissors!
No brand on the planet has changed more, or perhaps benefited more, thanks to its embracing of community, than Fiskars. The orange-handled scissors are just that: orange-handled scissors. Even Fiskars’s own brand managers didn’t see much sexiness in scissors in 2005 when the company started working with word-of-mouth marketing agency Brains on Fire.
We talked to Geno Church, who holds the title of word of mouth inspiration officer at Brains on Fire to find out more about how community can happen around scissors. What we discovered was that the scissor company was simply the common thread that tied a certain group of people together.
“They didn’t see that what they were doing meant that much to customers,” explained Church. “When we first got to their facility where the scissors were developed, there was white butcher paper over the windows to keep people from seeing the company secrets. Now, they give prototypes to members of their online community to use, break, critique, and offer suggestions around. It’s pretty amazing.”
How did Fiskars make such a stark evolution? Strategically, that’s how.
First, Fiskars’s marketing team did online market research to find out who, if anyone, was talking about scissors. They didn’t find a whole lot of scissor chatter, but they did discover pockets of communities around scrapbooking—people who use scissors. But when the team looked a bit closer, they realized the scrapbooking forums and message boards that existed in the mid-2000s were full of snark and venom.
The insight Brains on Fire turned over to Fiskars was that scrapbookers didn’t have a safe haven to create and communicate in a positive environment. There were already communities around scrapbooking that could prove valuable to a scissor company, somehow. But the social insight into the communities showed Fiskars they needed to actually create a new community with different rules. (See the Fiskars community in Figure 8.3, which shows a user’s dashboard view and his connections to other scrapbookers.)
Figure 8.3. Fiskars sponsors a community for scrapbookers to talk about scrapbooking, instead of scissors, and has amassed more than 8,000 community members who connect, engage, and collaborate with one another.
The Fiskateers website launched in 2006 with four scrapbook leaders and brand ambassadors chosen by the company, which had identified influential scrapbookers online and approached them with the idea of helping build a positive collaboration environment. The goal was to drive scrapbookers to the site to enjoy the arts-and-crafts hobby in a friendly environment, establish a relationship with these members as a brand to harvest feedback, help test and launch new products, and build a sense of passion around the brand.
The goal was to attract 200 people in 6 months.
“We met our goal in 24 hours,” Church laughed. By the 6-month mark, there were 1,800 members. As of early 2011, the community is 8,000-plus strong.
“We have a 500% value in return on community,” Church said. “We have incredibly loyal, passionate Fiskars customers who are not just fans of the brand, but invested in the brand.”
(We’ll dive a bit deeper in the value of the Fiskars community in Chapter 10, “Get Smarter: Social Media Marketing Drives Research and Development,” and illustrate how one strategy can accomplish multiple goals for your business.)
Think about how you can engage your customers and build community. If a scissor company can discover that its customers have a need to be filled in their online experience (a safe haven to discuss scrapbooking), perhaps you can discover a similar need for your audience.
This need is something we refer to as a social insight. Whereas advertising, marketing, and branding agencies conduct market research and surveys hoping to find a consumer insight that informs a marketing effort, social media marketers look through online information hoping to find this social insight: What can we provide our customers online that will make their digital experience better?
If your customers tell you they need a place to gather, whether for safety from negativity, access to information, or just a place to connect with other customers or fans, you have the insight you need to walk down the path of building community.
But What If Our Competition Shows Up in Our Community?
When building a community for the first time, it’s natural to wonder what could happen if your competition joins in. Honestly? Nothing. If they’re spending all their time in your community, they’re probably far behind the curve and wouldn’t be able to catch up for some time.
But beyond the reality of the scenario, let’s back up and remember the ethos of what we’re doing in social media. We’re trying to be honest, transparent, and customer-centric. What better way to accomplish all three but to openly engage with your competition along with everyone else?
We’re not advocating uncivil behavior. Not at all. But if your competition shows up, welcome them, encourage their (civil) discourse in the community, and embrace their input. Customers will translate that behavior into confirmation that you are the market leader and the more trustworthy of the lot.
Don’t see it? Meet Rand Fishkin. He was running what he called, “a half-assed web design, development, and user-experience” shop in 2002 when he started learning about search engine optimization, or SEO. He started a blog to share what he was learning about the art and craft of winning search rankings.
The blog was called SEOmoz (see Figure 8.4).
We interviewed Fishkin, who told us the main reason SEOmoz took off was the lack of blogs focused on SEO at the time. In his SEOmoz posts, he would mention new blogs coming on to the scene and comment on the topics the few others were writing about in his SEOmoz posts.
Figure 8.4. SEOmoz started out as an industry blog for search engine optimization specialists. It’s now recognized as the leading community of practitioners in the SEO industry. Source: www.seomoz.org.
“I would show off the work of others,” Fishkin told us. “Eventually, SEOmoz became a place where people went to see what everyone in the industry was doing or talking about.”
That community of blog commenters was a gold mine for Fishkin. In 2006, he wanted to diversify the opinions on his blog and began inviting commenters to guest post. He even intentionally invited the site’s biggest critics to show that the blog really was about offering a platform for opinions and insights, not just promoting Fishkin’s company, which by that time had evolved into an SEO consulting firm.
Fishkin added thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons to the site so users could rate and potentially elevate the best content to be more prominently displayed and get more traffic. But Fishkin insisted users behave.
“When they would thumbs down something or leave a negative comment, I would jump in and suggest they reword it or be more positive and empathetic,” he said. “Our mantra is to be transparent, authentic, generous, fun, empathetic, and exceptional. If we can’t be those things, we’re not being the best we can be. We insisted that the community hold itself to a high standard and over time we weeded the less-attractive elements out of SEOmoz.” What’s really amazing about the evolution of SEOmoz as a community and as a business is twofold. First, the audience Fishkin was first speaking to in 2004 and 2005 was his competition. The only people who want to talk about SEO all the time are other search engine nerds. True to his nature, Fishkin didn’t mind.
“Because of who I am and what I like to do...being transparent and sharing the resources I’ve learned from...I never hesitated to talk to the competition,” he explained. “I’ve never felt like SEO was a zero-sum game. Building up the SEO industry is going to have positive effects on everyone who plays in that marketplace.”
As a result of the Fishkin ethos, SEOmoz gradually emerged as one of, if not the leading authority on search engine optimization in the United States. Its site boasts it’s the “world’s largest SEO community,” and seldom does news break in the SEO world that Fishkin isn’t either in the middle of it, or at least quoted.
But even more compelling is that the evolution of SEOmoz as a community also drove the evolution of SEOmoz as a company. Beginning in 2007, Fishkin’s troops began offering SEO products (tools and resources, plus premium content) to their growing community. By 2009, the company actually ceased direct client consulting.
And to think, it all started out with Fishkin writing a blog that was essentially read by his competition. Think about your industry. Is there a dearth of online content available for people wanting to get smart about it? Is anyone watching the industry as a thought leader, highlighting other people’s work, evangelizing best practices, or commenting on the topics of the day you face? Perhaps you can.
Yes, your competition will notice, and yes, they may even join in the discussion. But in most industries and markets, there is not a zero-sum game. Elevating the industry can make you and your business stronger, make you more widely known and respected, and even give you a leg up on the competition. You can, after all, show they come to your site for learning and conversation.
Okay, So How Do You Do This and How Much Will It Cost?
Yes, it would be easy for us to say, “Okay! Go build a community now!” But it’s never that simple. You probably won’t start a blog that really serves your competition. You might not need to build an actual online community platform like Fiskars did because your customers might not need one. And CareOne turned on the lights and said, “Who needs some help with debt?”—which is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Building a community starts with relationships. Assuming you didn’t marry your spouse 6 minutes after meeting him or her, you should understand these things take time.
Because your community is made up of human beings—the most emotionally inconsistent of all mammals—you’re going to have to read and react a lot. Humans aren’t predictable. What works today will get a resounding, “That’s it?!” next month.
And yes, you’re going to have to engage in conversations with them. Community is built on the backs of human beings but with the wires of communications. Those wires are now two-way streets. If you’re not willing to listen and respond, you’ll never get community out of the transaction.
Still, you have to build communities with business in mind. If you don’t, you’re just playing in the sandbox. So you set goals for your communities:
• Increase online recommendations and referrals for your company.
• Drive higher frequency of purchase from your existing customers.
• Increase the lifetime value of your customer base.
• Drive X amount in revenue from your community membership fees and purchases.
• Reduce product launch costs by growing a community of first-in-line buyers to serve directly.
And then you build strategies and creative concepts to deliver on those goals.
Entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki offered up some savory tips on building communities in a February 2006 blog post5 in which he listed the following (among others) as “how-to” steps:
• Create something worth building a community around. Sure, it could be your product or service, but don’t forget that it could be an activity, a need, or an idea.
• Identify and recruit advocates immediately. They’ll stand out when you nail down the focus of your community. In fact, they’ll likely be some of the very customers you talked to in order to determine what that community focus is.
• Give people something concrete to chew on. For Fiskars, it was activities around scrapbooking. For your company, it might be tying in a new product, using it in creative ways, or even sharing experiences around the company.
• Welcome criticism. This is where you get valuable feedback from your customers. What they find wrong—or perhaps not so right—about you is helpful information, not complaining.
One of the last things Kawasaki adds is as important as all the rest, though. You have to publicize the existence of your community. Often, companies treat social media and web-based efforts as if they’re a virtual Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come, right? Not necessarily, and often, not at all.
Sea World San Antonio told everyone they could to like them on Facebook. CareOne advertises their support community through multiple mediums, including television. Every community takes a bit of critical mass to take on a life of its own. And if you’re not telling people it’s there, that critical mass is almost impossible to achieve.
Kawasaki’s advice is sound. Unfortunately, the classically trained marketers and traditional business folks typically do some disappointing things with those instructions. The typical flaws we see in client approaches to these recommendations include companies that build their focal point around the product or service. They will plant paid employees or advocates and try to hide the fact they’ve rigged the system. When the community members discover the frauds, and they inevitably will, the company will suffer from mistrust and even an exodus away from the community.
Traditional business owners and marketers typically insist on delivering a steady diet of coupons and product pitches to their community, which most of them won’t chew on but choke on. They’ll respond to criticism by censoring it, fearful it will breed more criticism rather than responding with empathy, which typically builds a higher degree of trust from the audience.
And, finally, they typically announce the community by purchasing advertising online that few people see, fewer people actually click on, and, if they’re lucky, a handful will convert and become members.
The misguided actions of the traditional marketer and business owner quickly remind us to remember the purist point of view in the social media marketing world: Make it about the consumer, not about you.
So, you can start to see the cost: time. If your research and understanding of your customers proves you might need to build a place where the community connects—like Fiskars did with the Fiskateers—there will be more financial commitment. If you feel the need to hire a social media marketing consultant or even an agency to help you develop a website, strategy, or community building campaign, that activity isn’t free.
But you can, like Sea World San Antonio, just invest the time to build a Facebook presence, encourage fans to engage with you there, and not invest a lot up front to build something. You can just write really compelling blog posts or even record a weekly 2-minute video with your CEO that is interesting, revealing, or even silly and put it on YouTube and invite your customers and employees to share it with their networks.
Community will be different for different companies, so there’s no turnkey answer to how you do this and how much it will cost. But there are some constants you’ll need to keep in mind:
• You already have community. You just have to give them a reason to talk about you and invite others into the community.
• What you give them has to be really compelling ... share worthy.
• You’ll build that community a lot faster if you and your employees are engaged with it and as part of that community, too.
• Your community will never be worth anything to you if you don’t start out by establishing clear goals for building it.
Revisiting a prevailing idea in this book: If you’re not doing it for a business reason and not measuring your success, it’s just a hobby. Don’t “play” with community building. Take the No Bullshit approach: Define goals. Establish measurable objectives. Enact strategies and tactics to accomplish them. Then measure what you’ve done to show what you’ve gotten out of it.
Endnotes
1. Richard Millington, “How Do Online Communities Generate Money?” http://www.feverbee.com/2009/12/how-do-online-communities-generate-money.html.
2. Alex Wipperfurth, Brand Hijack. Portfolio, 2005.
3. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point. Back Bay Books, 2000.
4. CareOneCredit.com—http://community.careonecredit.com/blogger-resources/w/wiki/defaultwikipage/revision/10.aspx, 2010.
5. GuyKawasaki.com—http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_art_of_crea.html#axzz1FVUjIO00, February 2006.