The Age of the Customer®, Part 15: Social media builds customer communities
Two things are sure with regard to social media and businesses: 1) as a way to connect with customers, social media is here to stay; 2) social media will evolve into an essential, customer community-building tool every successful business – large or small – will use.
“Social media” is the technology that makes online community building possible, not the community itself. It allows for the creation of, and service to, online communities, where dialogue and interaction among community founders and members are possible. While the term “social media” is handy, it would serve businesses well to think of it as “building online customer communities.”
There are two primary examples of these communities:
- A company’s profile and “fan page” on sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Your company can build communities with these public platforms, which are free, but have limits.
- Communities founded and hosted by your company and oriented around relationships with customers and prospects. This type of community is established when customers subscribe to one or more of your channel offerings in order to receive information. There is now new technology emerging that helps you create a Facebook-like social media platform that you host, which I predict will become the next killer app.
A channel is a syndication tool or method of content delivery and service to a community. For example, real simple syndication (RSS), a blog, email marketing, including an email newsletter (ezine), a text (SMS), and Twitter are channel tools, through which businesses serve their customer communities.
A website is a very important part of your online presence, but it is not a very effective community-building tool. However, a website can become a platform from which you launch and serve customer communities. Think of your website as the living room where you entertain new friends and social media communities as the den you share with close friends.
There is one critically important thing for a founding company to understand about both of the online customer community types: The company cannot control community behavior. Members – customers and prospects – control the conversation in the community. The founding company can only create and influence the community by establishing and demonstrating community values.
If value is the threshold of a community relationship, values are the foundation.
Write this on a rock …
Get started building online customer communities.
Jim Blasingame is creator and host of the Small Business Advocate Show.
Copyright 2011, author retains ownership. All Rights Reserved.
