Rubber Ducks

The shiny, not-so-new toy is community, enabled with social media/networking tools and everyone wants some. Blogs, forums, microsharing, ideas all rolled into a community… you name it and businesses are clamoring for it. Social media platform providers are lining up to sell you a host of features and solutions to satisfy that craving. But technology is just a small fraction of the overall equation – Jeremiah Owyang‘s recent Wave Report suggests technology is 20% and services, people, culture, etc. are 80% of the overall challenge. Are you even ready for the technology?

The secret is that you already have a community – many of them! Whether your company is tiny or enormous, you have communities of customers, prospects and employees, each with distinct needs, questions and ideas. The question is IF and HOW you are nurturing them now. I’ll use this post to talk about what you can be doing to nurture them now, regardless of whether you’re ready to pony up the big bucks.

Your Customers/Clients – This is the group everyone is talking about. “Create a conversation with your customers to create affinity and outpace your competitors” is the mantra. Here are a few things you can do today to start connecting with them ahead of building a community. By getting them talking with one another, building trust and getting your company used to the concept of transparency you’ll be better prepared when the time comes to launch your own community.

  1. Start a newsletter. I wrote a post on this a while back and see a lot of value in starting to develop authenticity with your customers using a  web 1.0 tool. Make sure to include your account management team in the mix – they’ll help make sure their clients open it up and participate.
  2. Schedule monthly conference calls for customers with your team/executives/outside experts. Ask them to submit requests for future sessions via the newsletter and provide access to recorded sessions via the newsletter. That thing on your desk with a blinking red light… it’s a phone and it still works.
  3. Support them with free tools. If they’re on Twitter, get on there and talk with them. If it makes sense for you to launch a page on Get Satisfaction, do it.

Your Prospects/Potential Customers – My former colleage and friend Aaron Strout likes to say “fish where the fish are” and it makes a lot of sense to heed his advice here. A great example of this happens every day on AVS Forum, a free forum for audio/visual enthusiasts. The discussions are robust and you’ll find vendors/company reps intermingled among the end-user members. Be authentic and provide helpful advice and members might migrate to your e-commerce site and make a purchase.

  1. Encourage people on your team to join forums and comment on blogs where people that might be interested in your company congregate. Advise them to leave the sales talk behind and just be helpful.
  2. Buy a Flip video camera and put together a quick amateur video about your company and team. At one point (can’t find it now) the folks at Jive had a cool video of everyone in their company telling why they loved working there. It was a great way to show the personality behind the company and gave a glimpse into what it would be like to work with them.

Your Employees – It’s easy to over look your team, especially when times are tough and everyone is putting in long hours to get everything done. But now, more than ever, is the time to kick your employee community into high gear. Apply a lot of the same concepts you’re thinking about for customers here.

  1. Launch an employee newsletter with a guest post from a different person each month (or week if you’re feeling adventurous). Keep the tone fun and make sure to include options for feedback and suggestions to improve. Don’t use it as a way to pump more marketing-speak down their throats – your open rate will hover near 0%.
  2. Pull together disparate groups for informal gatherings. Getting the folks from engineering together with marketing for an ice-cream social might seem like a corny idea, but these folks speak different languages and the sooner they develop mutual respect the better off you’ll be as a company.
  3. Try Yammer. Microsharing and content streams are the future of communication and collaboration and Yammer is a private version for your company. Give it a try to learn how to listen, learn and collaborate in short bursts. You’ll be amazed what you learn about your team and how it opens doors to creative solutions.

A story… A few years back I was talking with an executive that wanted to get started blogging, but the technology wasn’t ready for him yet. I handed him a blank notebook and told him to get started. When we met a few weeks later the book was still empty. I suggested he might not be ready for blogging just yet and he immediately understood that it had nothing to do with technology. He quickly adjusted his mental models and now he writes regular blog posts. Embracing social media and community is more about making a cultural shift… it’s not really about technology.

In the end, there’s a lot you can do today to get started. My list is far from complete. Just don’t wait until your community is launched and the members start streaming in… get started today.

What are you doing to nurture your community (ies) today? What could you add to the mix with a little effort?

Cool photo included in this post is from Felix63.