Community Building

There’s no doubt communities are an invaluable asset for businesses, but growing them and engaging them in a meaningful way is not an easy task. This article provides a thorough checklist covering all significant elements one needs to address to successfully build a community. We review topics relative to community benefits, goals, growth, management, empowerment and the strategic thinking behind all solid communities. If you are a social media marketer, a community manager, a brand manager or simply an individual interested in building a community, keep reading.

Most online profiles are searchable. And it should be so, because when people search about you, they should be able to derive a clear consistent image of who you are. And it is imperative that every online representation of you should add credible value to your brand.

Being part of a community is as much a privilege as learning from it. The first thing another community member sees about you is your member profile, based on which she builds an opinion about you. Although others observe more about you when you are amidst them, the first impression to even agree to meet you is established by what you wish to be known as, how your profile portrays you and what you get noticed for.

Community managers have quite a role to fit. Contrary to their name, they never have subordinates to get things done for them although they do have a lot of tasks on hand. They are the “do Gods” of any group: convening events, engaging the community, recognizing community members, arranging for Ask Me Anything sessions and much more. Then again, as humans, everyone tends to bring in a little bit of their own personalities into their jobs that basically makes them comfortable and differentiates them from each other.

Business networking has been a concept since the later half of the twentieth century and was started to help businessmen build their social capital. Soliciting references for new business possibilities and building mutually beneficial business relationships has been the core of business networking from the 2000s in the Americas.

Just like Snow White and her 7 dwarfs, the community manager is often challenged by one member or the other. But she still loves them all the same. Or does she?

We’ve said it time and again: a community is nothing without its members. But oh boy, is it sometimes challenging to unite everyone under a same cause, passion or purpose! In this article, we review 7 types of members that may challenge your community management skills, and how to best address them.

Failures are great

Sad to see that only successful events are discussed on most occasions. Boasting about our achievements is great, then again, the pitfalls in the process teach us much more than our entire experience. While most work towards winning the game, which is completely natural, failed community events are as important too. Be it large or small, failures are encountered at every step. Most of the time, we choose to avoid it and sometimes we choose to deal with it.
It is the same whether we talk about community events, marketing campaigns, or community engagement efforts. An identical question to a vivid audience can bring about different reactions and responses which could be indicators that could eventually lead to better understanding of the stakeholders of the conversation.

Modern brand-related communication and activity stands at the throes of a breakthrough; a complete overhaul if we will. Bigger bucks are being invested in online initiatives, and arenas that were hitherto dominated completely by offline marketing and branding activity, are soon turning into playing fields for people with the online edge.

Brands still opt for offline activity - especially large FMCGs, retail giants, and the F&B sector. After all, they cannot afford to miss out on eyeballs. However, they are ensuring that all their offline ventures (if any) are well documented online, and shared. Brands are investing money on advertising to give their activity a ‘push’ to go viral. So as things stand, amidst the gains of globalisation, it’s no secret that using social media marketing aptly can get us virality, visibility, and sales.

But, it has to be understood that while there are no hard and fast rules on how brands manage their social media marketing, there are a few ways that can break the conversation they have established with their community.

There are tons of social networks today. Some are built around the type of media shared, like Youtube for videos, Medium for blogs, and Instagram for images. There are few others like Facebook which are agnostic of any such classification. All kinds of consumers flock these social channels to share their content. The challenge arises when the same tools are to be used for community building and gathering people who think alike.

The Biggest Challenge Of Community Marketing

We built our communities with so much passion for the purpose it supports. Be it a Android User group, an iOS Developer syndicate, Social Impact forum or even a brand-focused one such as the Nike Runners Club or a cricket team fan assembly such as the Royal Challengers Bangalore, they all mean something very important to the people involved.

As introduced in a previous blog post on different types of community platforms, many organisations - companies, institutions, private communities, etc - are using community platforms in order to reach different goals, from marketing to communication or community building. Today, we dig deeper into several case studies hand-picked from recent business news in the hopes of making it easier to find out how a community platform can support you in achieving your goals.