building social communities for brands

Regarding internet marketing today, one of the most valuable things a Brand can do is be active within in the relevant conversations occurring in the emerging world of the social internet.   You can read a million posts that go on and on about the value a brand derives from participating in the conversation.  What occurs to me is that few will tell you how to actually build a community (meaning attract and engage members of the community).  This post is going to provide examples for building such a community based on a fictitious company, called Acme Ingredients, that manufactures ingredients.

We find all to often that Brands are “dipping their toes in the water” in the conversation.  Void of any defined marketing or communications strategy, we think these tactics can be potentially dangerous to your brand possibly presenting obstacles to future social strategies.

For context of this post, Acme’s client’s marketing objectives are to :

• • become known as the thought leader in their product category
  • create pull-through demand for their product

The community we recommended building doesn’t exist today.  Matter of fact, their RFP stated their intention to achieve these objectives through a redesign of their website.  While we agree their website needs work, we recommended a different approach.  Our approach recommended spending their marketing dollars to engage in “Conversational Marketing’” by participating in the emerging social media channels.

This post is focused on what to do with the community once it exists.  It is not about creating the foundation or communications infrastructure of the community.  However, it should be suffice to say that a Community can only exist around a conversation.  To determine if a conversation can hold water and support an active community, it must meet three very specific characteristics.

1. 1. It must be “interesting”. Consumers want to interact on interesting subjects.  It needs to appeal to the psychological aspects we have as humans to either learn or teach.
   2. It must be “popular”. People want to interact on topics that provide “status” either by directly attaining status or by being around people who have status.
   3. It must be “dynamic”. The conversation should be able to live and mature by itself. Like a living creature, it needs to grow, mature, and develop a personality.

Once the community conversation foundation is built, how do get people to it?  Well, lets start by saying there is no silver-bullet.  You need an experienced social marketer to help create, build, and implement your strategy.  Whatever marketer you choose, they should absolutely have these key qualifications:

• • • • • • • • Experience building Social Communities
              • Communications Strategy Expertise (within a Social Context)
              • Communications Execution Capability (within a Social Context)
              • Internet Marketing Expertise  (within a Social Context)
              • Public Relations Expertise (within a Social Context)
              • Collaboration Strategy Expertise (within a Social Context)
              • Technology Expertise (within a Social Context)

For Acme Ingredients, we’ve recommended building a social community (e.g. using Lotus Connections, Elg, etc. complete with profiles, groups, activities, etc, etc) around the ingredients conversation.  For the sake of this conversation, I’ll refer to the community we recommended as the “Ingredient Community”.   Anyone who has been in the internet business should know by now that “just build it and they will come” is not a strategy.  It takes careful and strategic planning.

To bring members to the Ingredient Community, we are recommending a comprehensive social communications strategy including some of the following tactics :

1. Start by building micro-communities (e.g. “Twitter Community”, “Facebook Community”, and “MySpace Community”.) around a simple but brand related topics that represent a non-complex conversation.    The conversation we targeted adheres to the three pillars of successful social conversations (interesting, popular, and dynamic).  Too many Brands think they can make a Twitter post at 8 am, noon, and 4p.m.  Don’t make this mistake.  That is how traditional marketing is done.  Conversational marketing is about conversations.  You can’t predict when the conversation will happen.  Brands should have an active presence in the time zones appropriate to their business. 

You should view your marketing efforts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and others as something more strategic than just meeting your tactical marketing objectives.

You can begin to imagine the long term value of these micro-communities if you understand they can be moved to more profound communities in the future.

Current efforts should focus on building the micro-community while your communications strategy should always leave the reader thinking you have the secret sauce – but haven’t shared it yet.

While our client begins to amass their micro-communities on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, we can then look to integrate more sophisticated social strategies.  Each of the strategies will have mechanisms in place to monitor effectiveness and to determine the ROI for each strategy.

1. Launch the Ingredient Community.
2. Launch the Acme’s new website.  The website will be designed holistically to integrate with the Ingredient Community strategy.
3. Utilize direct marketing techniques (email, direct mail, etc) from opt-in mail lists to invite consumers to the Ingredient Community.  Links on the direct mail will use PURL technology to maintain a theme of being conversational.
4. Utilize communications strategies in the micro-community conversations designed to “move” the micro-community members to the Ingredient Community.   Remember, each micro-community exists under a specific context and therefore requires a carefully planned and specific communications strategy to be effective.   The important thing to remember is that micro-community conversion takes time, but it will be worth the pay-off.
5. Utilize Banner Ads, SEO and SEM.  By using these techniques, we create a natural pull into the new community.
6. Establish Partnerships for Joint Marketing Plans.  Create partnerships with related brands or interested parties (not competitors) and create a holistic marketing strategy to move consumers to the community.  The premise of this strategy is that it participation should help each other meet their specific marketing objectives.

Once members begin to join the Ingredient Community, we recommended that Acme execute a very specific communications strategy as a member(s) of the community targeted to achieve their marketing goals.