Communities: Your strategic business asset

When talking about social media, you may have heard the word “community” thrown about. What is it? And why is it so important to marketers in today’s social web?

What’s a community?

At it’s most basic sense, a community is a group of people who share a similar interest. Community members interact through conversations and activities, in many cases through social media which provides the tools for them to learn, share ideas, or just to shoot the breeze.

Examples of communities include

• Perodua Myvi owners
• Manchester United supporters
• Fans of The Beatles
• A university alumni
• Customers of a company

The importance of communities

In the social web, communities are becoming a strategic asset to companies more than ever. Just like brand equity, a stable of patents, an audience – an engaged community can make the difference for a company or organisation. Just think of Apple Inc’s small but fiercely loyal customer base, or Barack Obama’s web-savvy supporters during the US elections.

Communities may be intangible assets, but their benefits are definitely tangible. Engaged community members are more loyal (giving you repeat business), invested in your product (so they’ll tell you how to make it better than your competitor), they love your product (resulting in free word of mouth), they share knowledge with each other (lowering your support and marketing costs).

I like to define “marketing” as the process of “creating profitable relationships”. If that’s the case, a community is a a bundle of relationships waiting to become profitable to your company.

It’s hard work building communities

There’s no shortcut. You can’t just throw up a blog and expect to have a community. A Facebook Page with thousands of Fans doesn’t necessarily mean that they are engaged. Contests and campaigns merely draw crowds that don’t stick around long enough to become a real community. You need to work hard answering questions, informing and educating, being an advocate and cheerleader to earn the attention and trust of your community. Managing a community has even become a real job.

You have to build your community and you have to start now. Because, when you need those word of mouth referrals, when you’re conducting a bootcamp and need participants, when you want to tell someone about your great new product, you can’t magically conjure a community out of thin air when you need it at a moment’s notice. Communities are based on relationships, and that takes time to build.

Fortunately, there’s good news. It’s now easier than ever to build an engaged community with all the available social media tools. Tools like blogs, Facebook, and YouTube help you maximise your time, leverage your network and help connect you with community members all over the world. That takes some of the hard work out of building a community.

But you have to start now. Identify your community. What is their main interest? How can you help them with that more? I’ll write more about some of the ways to build community in my next post, but in the meantime you should check out the Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt. It’s a great resource on growing a business’ social capital.

Photo credit: little crowd by asleeponasunbeam

If you want to learn about the tools to help you build a community and create profitable relationships, please consider registering for my Buzzmedia Bootcamp: Social Media Basics 1-day training seminar.