If you are a business it’s likely you’re:
– Wondering how to engage with clients, suppliers and prospects…
– Wondering how to “start a conversation” with your customers…
– Overwhelmed with all the talk about “engagement in the community” and “must-have Social Media tools”
Social Media has transformed the Internet from a passive one-way communications channel to a multi-faceted marketplace where customers are actively talking about your brand. Marketers holding back for fear of “hearing bad things” are missing the point – and wasting a golden opportunity. FEAR, after all, is nothing more than:
False
Expectations
Appearing
Real
Marketers who are part of the conversation can get valuable product insights from their customers that would cost thousands using traditional marketing approaches alone. And keep this in mind… customers say things when they want you to do something better… so that THEY can do more business with you.
It’s more than just research though. It’s about:
- getting involved and listening and…
- building “brand advocates” and “brand defenders.”
- Getting a competitive edge
People who believe in your brand and are eager to talk about it with friends, family and peers are more powerful than any one-way marketing message you distribute.
To build community, however, you must build trust.
Here are 15 ways to build trust, community and start the conversation. Use these tips and you can build your brand and increase your brand awareness at a cost of literally pennies.
1. Get Engaged
Meet your customers online and engage with them. Start with seeing what they’re saying on their blogs. Listen to and participate in their communities
2. Interact
Give customers a platform to interact with you and engage where you can to solve their problems. Your own blog integrated with your site is a one way to do this. A forum is another.
3. Your Place or… Somewhere Else?
Help people to engage with you on your site… you have better control than if they do it elsewhere
4.Take Note…
Monitor everything that’s being said about you ( you can do this by setting up a Google Alert) and engage where you can help
5. Get Out There!
Don’t wait for people to come to you… get out there and go where your customers are. Don’t know where they go to talk on the web? Ask them.
6. Say Something…
Comment on other blogs. Not only does this get you known, it enables people to check out your own blog and is good for SEO.
7. Create a forum
A forum is one of the best ways of creating an online community and gaining customer insights and finding out what’s important to your customers. When you integrate it into your own site you demonstrate commitment and it encourages a feeling of safety for your customers.
8. Create communities of interest
Whether these are Facebook Groups, MySpace Profiles or LinkedIn or on your own website. Communities generate fans and fans are enthusiastic. Fans are what you want. Put their enthusiasm to work by encouraging them to generate and share their own content on your site.
9. Help Them Help Each Other
When community members help each other out with tips, advice and their own feedback this is powerful. Generate discussion and feedback by encouraging this – allowing members share and use their own content. Sites doing this particularly well include OPEN Forum by American Express (Small Business) DELL Community (Computers and Hardware) and The Nest for home buying help and my absolute favourite BlacKBerryForums.com
10. Rate and Share…
Encourage content rating and sharing on your site or blog, using Digg, StumbleUpon and or other rating tools.
11. Bookmark This
Encourage your fans to share content by offering a range of Social bookmarking tools . See a selection under the Share This tool on this and all my blog posts.
12. Tweet Up or FaceBook!
Open a Twitter account (or accounts) and invite people to “follow” you. You may think your customers don’t tweet… but you may be surprised. Twitter takes some getting used to and can be very time intensive however it is amazing for discovering new trends and finding out what people are saying. Facebook is good for creating relationships
13. Get RSS’d
Ensure you have an RSS feed on your blog or site. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your content by including prominent subscription tools on your blog or wherever you – or they - add content.
Building trust and community takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. it can take months and years for true community to form and as with anything worthwhile it takes dedication, commitment, planning and patience. But the rewards of an active and vibrant community is worth its weight in gold and very powerful.
It goes without saying that to succeed you must have a plan for building your community. If you are gathering insights you also need to ensure you have a process for taking customer ideas and implementing them as well as sharing feedback with them. Do not skip this step – unless you want to be disappointed. Many people jump straight into the tools however if you do this you’ll end up frustrated.
Trust – and community – doesn’t just happen. And while Social Media tools facilitate conversation they are only tools - you must still be part of the conversation and cultivate the community.
Use a combination of blog posts, polls, forums, photo-sharing, social networking sites, video and audio – whatever your audience wants to use.
Actively engage your audience and over time you could find even your most challenging customers can become your strongest brand defenders as well as your most loyal customers.
