The measure of success: whether you can create meaningful and useful participation for customers
A recent article in Smartcompany magazine titled Sites for more eyes examines how companies can build online communities for their customers. It offers 10 tips on building communities, drawing on an interview with me for two of the tips:
Tip #3 – Create champions for your product
Find the people who are the champions of your community and get them on board. Contact them individually, have lunch with them and persuade them to make a contribution by writing a blog or participating in your forums.
If you can make opinion leaders in your area passionate advocates for your product, they can be very powerful in attracting eyeballs to your site.
Web 2.0 innovator and Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says you may only identify your champions through the participation opportunities provided by your site, but once identified it is important to make a connection with them.
“Not only will they bring other people in their orbit to your website, they will bring useful or thought-provoking opinions, which are a vital resources, so champions can be very important,” Dawson says.
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Tip #7 – Let your customers interact – with your business, and each other
Forums are a crucial way of fostering a community around your brand. Ideally, your website should become a place where people who are connected by a common interest in what you do come to talk and socialise. This, more than anything else, will create content and keep people coming back to your website.
“Interaction is the main drawcard for any website; in effect, it is the payoff you offer visitors for coming to your website,” says Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network.
Dawson says you can also give people a stake in your product by giving them the opportunity to participate in the way your business works: a competition to name or choose a colour or style for a product can give people a reason to come to your website, and tell their friends.
The heart of the issue here is meaningful participation. That’s what companies grapple with. They often want to create customer loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing without the hassle and inconvenience of true participation. For all the talk of customer innovation, only a small minority of companies are genuinely looking for product development and marketing ideas from their customers. If they were to do so, that would easily generate the right ideas to create a fabulous community. If discussions were useful to the company, they would also be useful to the community, if designed correctly.
In the interview for this article, I said that there would be far, far more failures than successes in companies endeavoring to build customer communities. There is one clear measure of success: whether you create participation that is meaningful and useful to your target group. It is extraordinary how many online initiatives don’t start with that in mind.
