Community spirit? No, we want community action!

by Giles Luckett

Online communities have become something of a brand obsession in recent years. Many proudly espouse their number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers in the same way that homepage hits and linger times were boasted in the days of the dot com boom. And why shouldn't they? The continuing shift from search to share and the rise of phenomena such as social shopping means brands have to build online communities if they are to survive, let alone thrive. Alas, what many have yet to grasp is the fact that simply having an online community isn't enough and if they really want to benefit from such groups they need more than community spirit; they need community action.

Let's get back to basics for a moment and recall the old direct marketing adage, 'Numbers are vanity, revenues are sanity'. In the social and 'mocial' age as we now obliged to call it, it could do with updating to 'Numbers are vanity, actions are sanity': for getting your online community motivated is one of the key challenges that all forward thinking brands face. Large follower and fan numbers are great; they make you look successful and interesting, they help with SEO and give marketing teams a warm feeling of a job well done. However, if they are merely passive observers and occasional commentators then they become like a massive but unresponsive direct mailing list - a potentially costly headache.

Brands need to seek true engagement and learn not to see the 'Like' or 'Follow' as job done but as job begun. Such clicks are often not an indication of undying fascination but may be based on a single facet of your brand, a single post or simply a momentary whim and from then on in you'll be competing for their attention with every other brand who has received the same, potentially greater, expression of interest.

It's a real problem and to counter it brands must make communities places members want to be active citizens of. How? Well, there are several ways this can be done. For a start you can encourage greater levels of interaction from a broader spectrum of the members. The average Twitter community, for example, sees less than 1% of its members contribute more than 99% of the content. If only 5% became involved the community experience would not only be richer, but increase the chances of others getting involved as the range of conversations is so much wider. A trick for doing this is to post periodic 'soft' tweets - ones that show that having something profound, witty, insightful or clever is not the requirement to participate many believe it to be.

An all too common mistake is for brands to just talk about themselves and their communities' relationship with them. Brand navel gazing - unless you're a cult such as Apple - may be fascinating to you but will soon have the bulk of your fans turning off or dropping out. Remember you are part of their community as much they yours, so talk to them about issues that are beyond your brand but which are contiguous with their other interests.

And finally don't forget to think outside the box... Wall, Stream or Circle, and post and re-post beyond your social media bases onto blogs, forums etc. This will not only give you a free SEO tickle but will draw voices into your community that might have otherwise gone unheard.

Of course, the ultimate goal, the Holy Grail if you will, is to convert your community members into digital advocates: loyal followers who will actively sing your brand's praises and have a multitude of new fans beating a path to your virtual door. And to help you find your way to such a digital heaven (because we're nice like that at balloon dog!) here are five easy to steps...

• Make it worthwhile from click one - incentivise not just your 'Like' or 'Follow' but the first post, retweet or share. Get them in the habit early and it'll soon become second nature.
• Get to know them - who are they? Where do they go when they're not with you? Do they regularly visit your site? Look at their interests. Are they regular posters - if so, are they ripe for digital advocacy?
• Keep the barriers to activity as low as possible - technical barriers are coming down all the time - Google+ instant photo sharing for example - but make sure you keep perceived barriers down too; a dearth of posts (or worse a dearth of responses) will keep people at bay, as will uninteresting ones - telling the world that you've a new name for a new product won't get much of a response; asking them to name it will.
• Constantly reward - from a simple thank you for following to a win a year's supply of product for the most popular post of the year. Nothing encourages like encouragement.
• Make it feel like a real community - get behind community-sympathetic online campaigns, arrange events, hold regular hangouts in Google+, celebrate members (with their permission), gossip, share, speculate, crowd source and collective create just as you do in the real world.

Your online community are potentially your greatest online asset. Encourage them, motivate them and give them a reason to care about the community and then no matter what you're trying to achieve online it will become much, much easier. Ignore them, bore them or lose sight of the fractional nature of the community membership and you'll turn attractors into detractors.