Once upon a time, customers were enigmatic creatures who bought your product and used it in curious ways. Your marketing efforts were awkwardly split between trying to understand why your customers buy, and attracting the even more mysterious group known as prospects.
Today, things are different. Companies now realize customers are a special group who have much more in common with the business than anyone suspected. They aren’t viewed simply as people to be conned into buying more, but as friends, colleagues and partners. Many of them hear from you much more often now, as you get into their heads with weekly or monthly newsletters. They also can visit your website to leave reviews or comments, or follow you on Twitter, (you may even follow them back). Or we may all “like” each other and share funny photos on Facebook.
Business is evolving from the traditional “two solitudes” (marketer/buyer, us/them) into a community. For the first time, marketers can get to know their customers by sharing diverse, robust and continuing dialogue through new and emerging technology channels. Companies can conduct personalized marketing to customers en masse, at price points so low they were unimagined 20 years ago. Now, they can hear the voice of the individual consumer, raw and honest, creating unmatched opportunities to build relationships, gain regular feedback, and encourage more purchases and referrals.
But how do you make a community work when most customer dialogue is of little value, and “like” means clicking a button for a one-time reward? That’s the essence of The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Second Edition), by Jono Bacon, a community manager best known for his work with the open-source software community Ubuntu.
Yeah, he’s an open-source guy, an idealist who believes people are at their best creating value for others in free communities of interest. Yet his book is also aimed at businesses that truly want to deepen their customer knowledge and relationships — and he admits communities can be tough to manage. If it were easy, Vol. 2 probably wouldn’t be 525 pages, or 130 pages longer than its predecessor.
Is community-building for your business? Consider Tenet’s basic assumptions about community, and decide for yourself if it intrigues you or makes you gag: In a community, trust is everything. Nobody owns the community (although of course you can lead it). Trust comes from understanding, empathy and listening. Community is created “by the conversation it holds with itself.” The essence of community is shared story-telling. Collaboration is the key.
Bacon even quotes Henry Ford, who said: “Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success.”
In my experience, many businesses are unconsciously anti-community. They don’t share information well, they’re not good at telling stories. They have no confidence in the communication skills of their own employees, let alone their customers. The question is: is this new age of engagement, customer feedback and crowd-sourced innovation worth transforming the company culture?
Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success
Bacon says the essence of communication is simple: Be clear, concise and responsive. Be fun (don’t let your need to be professional overshadow your people’s personalities) and human (if you screw up, apologize.)
Bacon offers four steps for setting up a community that should be familiar:
- Create a mission statement that outlines the broad aims of the community;
- Based on the mission statement, produce a set of high-level objectives;
- Create a set of goals for each objective — near-term outcomes you want to achieve;
- For each goal, create a set of actions.
One of your key tasks will be to identify someone to take charge of this project. While your tendency may be to deputize a marketing intern, your community manager should ideally have both technical and marketing skills, an in-depth understanding of the company and its products, and a passion for both customers and the brand. As Bacon warns, “Unlike positions with a longer history in companies, where roles and expectations are clear, community management embodies a lot of ambiguity and can confound hiring managers.”
Bacon’s book includes many ideas for establishing processes and protocols in your online community, maximizing feedback from community members, leveraging social media, building buzz and managing conflict. But the best part is the interviews with veteran community-builders such as Linux founder Linus Torvalds and vocalist/songwriter Mike Shinoda of California metal band Linkin Park. They remind us all communities start small, and that the struggle for better engagement never ends.
“We poll our fan base to find out what they’re up to,” Shinoda says. “We collect whatever data we are allowed to. We create separate online access points, and embrace all the different ways people choose to keep in touch with our band, so they can connect to us via whatever thing [Twitter, Facebook, video games, etc.] they like to use.”
Above all, build for the future, not the past. Do you know why Linkin Park spells its name that way? Because in 1996, the URL LincolnPark.com was taken.
Rick Spence is a writer, consultant and speaker specializing in entrepreneurship. His column appears weekly in the Financial Post. He can be reached at rick@rickspence.ca