One of my favorite bloggers Jeremiah Owyang recently posted an article on how to kick start a community. In his article he lists out 9 practices he has heard from companies that have built successful communities, but before I go into the practices I would like to make some key points about starting a community.
- Long-Term - When building your social media strategy make it very clear to the stakeholders that there is no quick short-cut in creating a community.
- Make it Easy - Do not create long registration forms. Make it easy to participate.
- Listen - Always, listen for feedback to evolve your strategy.
- Lifestyles - Do not communicate using one channel. Use multiple channels so your customers can choose a channel that caters to their lifestyle.
- Offline - When applicable do not only think online, test offline strategies too.
- Participate / Engage - Do not just create a strategy that just pushes out information / content. Engage your community, show them you are listening, tell them you are there if they need help.
- Passionate - Create a team that is passionate about the social media channel.
Here are the 9 practices:
1. Create compelling content on a recurring basis. Brands sometimes create videos, podcasts, or stories on a daily or weekly basis that encourages members to come back.
2. Reward users who fill out their profile. Folks like to see other friendly faces, so giving them access to premium features or recognition of those who have the most complete profiles should recognized.
3. Invite community influencers and advocates to the community first –giving them first right of testing the system and then inviting others.
4. Encourage interaction through conversations. Ask questions, talk about controversial topics, or host a contest that encourages participation.
5. Reward top contributors: Those that participate the most, or perhaps, are the most helpful should be recognized on a leader board, and thanked in public. Unexpectedly, send them something nice as a thank you, or reward them with premium services – never money.
6. Centralize your community around your real world events. People want to find each other before events, talk about the event during the duration, and then afterwards are key. Use the community in your physical events.
7. Virtual Events integrate community: Don’t just use on your real world events, but integrated with your virtual ones, I‘ve written at length about that here.
8. Integrate with your website –and other customer touchpoints. Remember, corporate sites of the future are aggregations of community discussion, be sure to integrate community in your corporate site. Make sure your call center, email marketing, and external newsletters all integrate community. (don’t forget even the email signatures)
9. Encourage employees to get active. A party isn’t much fun if there’s no one there, so encourage the hosts (often employees) to kickstart discussions by talking, debating, and arguing about the news, updates, or even relevant YouTube videos will trigger discussion. Of course, you have a community manager on staff, right?
Source: Web Strategist