Designdamage Blog

There has been a few interesting development recently on the social web specifically with Facebook replacing the ‘become a fan’ phrase with a ‘Like button‘ and launching ‘Community Pages‘; expect all mainstream websites to gradually adopt the like button enabling visitors to see if their friends or family like the content (peer influence) as well as the number of people liking something. The other news is Twitter’s new tool that allows tweets to be directly embedded on third-party sites, making it easier to quote and share content .

This growing trend of the web becoming social will continue to encourage people to use it social. The more social the web gets, the more conversations it generates resulting in a permanent record of everything and anything people talk about, including your brand. Even if you’re not online or don’t have an online business, internet will continue to record down what people say about your brand.

And reputation is word-of-mouth thus it will only benefit your business if you include your community in defining your brand. So how can brands take control of their reputation via the social web?

One solution is through community building, the foundation of your brand’s reputation.

What’s In A Community?

Think of your community as a single platform where people can all gather to interact with your brand and each other expressing their opinions about your products and services. You don’t need  thousands or even hundreds of people to start a community, it can be started with just a few people with the same interest and are willing to participate.

When building a community consider the following groups that makes up the community ecosystem:

Prospects – Interested in your product or want to learn more about it
Customers - Made a purchase already
Employees - Individuals that works for you and/or stakeholders
Vendors - You bought from them (suppliers, service providers, operating expenses)
Partners - Companies or individuals that you have business relationship with, a reseller or distributor of your products
Media - Journalist or publications that covers your industry or your product category
Regulators - Authorities or individuals that regulates your industry, could be government or non-government

If you’ve been in business for a while, you should be familiar with the groups above.  The idea of having your own online community is to centralize communication via a single platform where you can empower members of your communities to interact with each other and engage with your brand.

How Communities Benefit Brands

Why would companies want to spend time, resources and money on building their community? The answer is simple, community defines your brand, demonstrates social proof and creates business opportunities.

Defining your brand - So instead of trying to control how you want people to see your brand, the ideal approach is to become part of that process by providing a dedicated community.  A platform that allows prospects, customers, peers, colleagues and stakeholders to interact with each other,  ask questions about your products, comment on their service experience or simply give praises. This is why brands are uniting their customers and fans online using platforms such as an online discussion forum, a Facebook Fan Page, or a LinkedIn Group as their primary ‘homebase’ to build their community. It’s fast, simple and easy to do.

In addition you can expand the community offline or locally adding tools such as Meetup.com, Amiando or Eventbrite. The goal is to provide easy access across multiple channels for your fans to hangout and express their feelings and ideas about your brand.

Social Proof and influence -The best way to change people’s behaviors is through peers that they trust and/or respect. Done right, your community will become one of your most powerful marketing vehicle helping you sell via conversations and defending your brand during crisis. This is also an emerging trend as many brands are leveraging customers and employees as brand advocates to help spread the “brand voice.” If prospective customers read some comments on how great your services are and sees many happy customer feedbacks (via your Facebook wall, Yelp, Amazon or blog), you’re likely to move them further down the sales cycle not to mention the information can be used for marketing as well as support reference.

Even Toyota is bouncing back from it’s PR nightmare because the brand still has a strong following and they’ve earned their customer’s trust over a long time. This is why sports fans are loyal to their teams and often go to the distance to defend their teams/players because they are part of a specific team’s fan community.

Opportunities to improve – Another benefit of building an online community is over time your community will accumulate enough information to enable you to abstract valuable insights to improve your products, services and reputation.  One of the more popular approach is using crowdsourced data to help craft marketing campaigns and get the community involve to deepen the trust and create brand awareness.

And with those that are concern about negative word of mouth? My recommendation is to have a plan in place so you can respond in a timely matter with the right social media and crisis management policies. This way, when things go south, you can quickly pinpoint the problem and identify the proper solution to resolve the issue. In fact, it’s an opportunity to turn negative buzz to strengthen the relationship with customers.

As for managing the community it really depends on how your organization is structured for customer engagement. For example, during presale you can task your sales team to answer pre-sale questions and have your customer support staff responsible for postsale engagement. Then categorize and archive the Q&As to be used in the future for prospectives and customers.  You can import them into your CRM system or publish them as FAQs.

Keep in mind that managing the community should not be limited to the marketing department, in fact, the marketing department should help facilitate the interaction to improve the brand experience by providing insights abstracted from the community to other department. Product engineers can learn how customers are using the product, sales staff can identify the main concerns of prospective customers and marketers can better position and communicate more effectively.

If your organization needs to hire a community manager, I highly recommend following the Community Maturity Model by The Community RoundTable, a private peer network for community managers and social media practitioners.

According to The Community RoundTable, “this model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization.”

This is an excellent way of looking at what’s necessary to build a serious, large scale community. As for small businesses, I recommend to simply focus on 1 or 2 of the competencies below that aligns with your business objectives and just keep working at it. Use a systematic approach to nurture your community and determine how it impacts your business.

Are you ready to start building your online community? Here is 3 areas to think about:

1) Intent vs Outcome – Know why you’re doing this, what the community is about and be prepared to respond to unexpected outcomes. Create policies and define a clear purpose also helps to motivate members by giving meaning to participation and build collaborative work by providing a common focus. With clarity, members will define the purpose on a common ground to grow the community. Once trust and respect are earned from the community, members will be more incline to be loyal to your brand and what you stand for which should be beyond just a profit-making machine. It’s a commitment between the community and its members.  Your reward as a business should be fueled by the appeal you have with the community.This is why a growing number of companies are investing in content marketing by publishing free resources to influence the perception of brand value and demonstrate expertise.

2) Communicate with Meaning and Authenticity - The key in building a meaningful community is to be authentic and stay true to you brand. If you ask your customers what your brand means and you don’t like the answer, perhaps you need to rethink your brand strategy, marketing communication and your corporate culture. Effective communities develop leadership teams, equip and deploy members for action, understand and engage with their community purpose to achieve impact. Besides, if you already have customers out there, they may be waiting for you to provide a platform to speak.

Companies are humanizing themselves and to be human is to have a personality. You must accept that you will make mistakes and not everyone is going to like your personality.  However, you should be able to demonstrate expertise in whatever it is that you provide via free education and resources.

If you say what you mean and mean what you say, your community will be on your side.

3) Serve First, Sell Later – The perception of an expert is not only to have invaluable knowledge but a positive reputation. Focus on the needs of your members by making things as easy and frictionless as possible. It’s a team effort, the community as a whole never just about one person but a collective effort to keep the community going. The bottom line is community builds trust and it’s not related to making money.

Focusing on financial gain leads to short-term decisions based on cost that’s not sustainable for the future. A focus on the community (or the customer), on the other hand, can lead to happy customers, employees, and partners.

I thought this TEDtalk by Derek Silvers on “how to make a movement” was an interesting way to think about building a community for your brand and why leadership may be over glorified. The video is about 3 minutes long.

The take away: Brands have customers and when these customers have reasons beyond the product and services that they sell, there is a cause.  That cause is what motivates people to connect and spread your brand’s idea.  The greater the commitment to a cause the greater the commitment to the community. Like the great American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.”

Whether it’s in a social network or a weekly local meeting, ALL brands should consider fostering relationships through community building. For me, I have my blog and Facebook Page to build my community.

Do you have a platform to grow your community? Where should your customer go when they want to be part of what you do and what you believe in?

After my last post on “How to use Google and Twitter to Find your Customers,” I’m following up on how to abstract value to improve your ideas; whether it’s for your marketing research or product innovation, the intention for gathering these data should NEVER be for spamming but to help integrate your value proposition into what people are truly interested in.

If you can become part of what people are interested in, you will have a better chance of connecting. Therefore it’s best to utilize permission marketing when executing your communication strategy.  Getting more data is great, but it’s not intended so you can just add more people to your weekly email blast. Making quantitative analysis can help you create interesting ideas that differentiate your brand and drive actions.

So how can social media create opportunities for you?

Understand The Social Network Ecosystem

First, learn how each social network ecosystem works and the habits of the emerging “social consumers.” Think of each social network as a town and the ecosystem is basically the infrastructure of the town. Knowing how each social network is used is like having the map of the town. Once you have knowledge of the streets around town, the next step is to find and connect with your customers.  This is where my last post comes in handy, if you can identify a social consumer online, he or she is more likely to have multiple social networking accounts which can help you to further profile your target audience.  This is especially helpful if you use a CRM (Customer Relationships Management) system such as GoldMine, Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.

Let’s look at B2C (business-to-consumers) social consumers; these are people that are willing to share their personal information on social networks engaging in activities such as updating their Facebook status, displaying their locations on Foursquare, leave their product reviews on Amazon or restaurant reviews on Yelp. If you apply the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, you can expect the power users represent 20% of the users that’s generating 80% of the activities. Accordingly to the latest study by Chadwick Martin Bailey, “consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers…The study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch.”

The idea is to focus more on the power users that command influence within the social networks. Keep in mind connecting with “medium” and “light” users also helps to earn social proof and trust via the long-tail.

For B2B (business-to-business) the leading examples are LinkedIn, BusinessInsider, StockTwits, OpenForum by AmericanExpress and BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange to see how businesses building communities that connects and shares information. They represent how social network can be utilize to build a community by providing practical value whether it’s a piece of software, platform, resource center or networking destination, they give back in return to what participants put in.

I recommend doing some in-depth research to get useful data on demographics of your target audience.  Then identify the appropriate social network(s) that fits your demographics to go after. The key to success will be your understanding of how your target social consumers think, act and make decisions.  What and who influence them? How much research was done prior to the purchase? What was the second or third option?

Implementing Accountability and ROI

Now that you’ve got your customer profiles and social network(s) identified, what’s next? For businesses serious about ROI (return on investment), it’s time to increase accountability of your marketing efforts.

You can do this by using existing data or the customer insights from your research (profiling, surveys, CRM) to create campaign projections, a realistic goal that you aim for. Then create a mix of financial and nonfinancial metrics that you NEED to measure, not what you can measure. This is to help you understand how your marketing activities impact the bottom line and how you can optimize them by doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Make sure you track your marketing cost as well as where the money is coming from to justify true ROI and conduct performance analysis. How much does it cost to run a local campaign vs. national campaign? What results are you getting targeting moms instead of kids? Can you compare the effectiveness of your marketing investments in direct marketing and affiliate marketing?

Another great use of these valuable customer data is to share the insights with your customer service representatives, sales staffs, product development engineers, design teams, or anyone that will benefit from them.  If the sales staff knows what words or questions your target audience used most frequently when talking about your product, they can craft a better sales pitch.  If product engineers realize how many different ways people actually use the products they create, they can improve and create better products. If the design team identifies how your customers come to visit your page and where they clicked, perhaps they can increase the conversion rate on your next campaign.

You can also involve them in the insight generation process to help increase the adoption and with regular distribution of these insights, everyone will take part to improve your business incrementally.

Ultimately you want to have a holistic view of your customer data so not only do you know what they’ve purchased, but also what they think about your industry, how they talk about your brand, and why they react to your campaign a certain way.

Simply put, it all comes down to keeping up with the shifts in how people think and act as well as the technologies used. If you’re unable to keep up then outsource part of your social media efforts to marketers, consultants or agencies; but make sure you understand the implications.

Here is an short and excellent report on how social media influences paid search by GroupM Research.

The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption

The take away: The key to effective marketing communications is to have a solid brand strategy. It’s indicative that social media must work together as an integrated whole of your brand strategy because your brand lives day-to-day in communication platform such as sales presentations, company brochures, product packaging and now the semantic web. Synchronizing these efforts assures consistent communication of your brand’s strategy, helping to create brand awareness and recognition of who you are and why you matter.

Moving forward, there will be an increase demand for marketing ROI as more data becomes available and new measuring tools are developed.  As always, focus on the signal instead of the noise, maximize the value of social media to improve your business beyond marketing.

What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts and feel free to share your ROI metrics.