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Social Proof, Circles Of Trust and Your Customer

trust

The opinion of others is an important driver in the buying decision of people. It has always been so. Word-of-mouth is still predominantly an offline matter although it's really foolish to separate the online and offline dimension of peer advice in an omnichannel reality. While there are differences between the ways we buy consumer products and business solutions there are many similarities as well: we inform ourselves by taking into account the opinions of our circles of trust. As the B2B buying process is often a group decision and in specific markets, we rely more on analyst advice, it's important to make a distinction in defining these circles of trust and even look beyond the differences between B2B and B2C. It's really a matter of knowing how YOUR customers take decisions. The circles of trust and influence indeed differ. What we often call social proof also has impacts that are more emotional (social pressure, how we perceive others etc.) in steering our buying decisions … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community marketing, Customer relationships, Relationship marketing, Social media marketing Tagged With: , ,

Community Engagement: Six Tips to Engage your Community

6 tips to engage your community (photo flickr DairDair)

Without comunity engagement you can't continue running a good community and you won’t have any  interaction. Communities exist but to identify them, give them a place and involve them, just sharing content is often not enough. Community engagement depends on the benefits for the members constituting it. Here are some techniques to start community engagement and more important, to keep it going. Check out these six emotional community engagement tips. 1. Get people to tell stories. People love to share themselves with others. If you become a conduit for this type of communication between people, you will capture the emotions of your audience like no other. You get bonus points if you provide a large audience for the true performers in your ranks. … [Read more...]

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Branded Customer Communities: What Consumers Expect

Branded customer communities infographic - source GetSatisfaction

Can branded customer communities drive more revenue than Facebook ads? Asking the question is answering it. Social networks are not the holy grail of customer acquisition, retention and loyalty. Online communities are. Building a community within one single platform such as Facebook or LinkedIn is not enough to build effective online communities for your customers. Branded customer communities provide more possibilities. … [Read more...]

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Improving Customer Retention Using Online Customer Communities

Customer communities and other community types - source Dion Hinchcliffe on ZDNet

Online customer communities are great ways to boost customer retention and move from retention to customer loyalty or even advocacy. Customer retention is one of those business issues that generally don’t get attention until a crisis occurs. That is, the customers actually begin to leave. At this point, executive focus turns almost exclusively to the problem at hand. However, organizations need not wait until customers are jumping ship. Once this occurs, companies often find themselves scrambling in search of ways to retain those customers. Online customer communities are key to retaining customers, and strategies can be put in place well before a crisis has materialized. Socious has six great tips at their blog. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community marketing, Customer relationships, Customer service, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why Online Communities are Undervalued – and often Fail

community registration

Online communities existed before we even heard about blogs. Since social technologies and platforms popped up, the number of possibilities to facilitate, nurture and engage online communities has exploded. Strangely enough, communities are not given the attention they deserve by businesses. Most of the time, you will find community engagement and management ideas when looking for information on the topic. However, online communities are about much more than that. While we mainly talk about conversations and engagement in social media, community is the true force in a connected era. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community marketing, Relationship marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Online Communities Are Like Coral: Give Them Space To Grow

community coral

“I told a friend and she told two friends and so on and so on…” Those words come from a famous seventies commercial campaign for a shampoo. It was ingenious in that it not only recognized the power of word-of-mouth advertising, but capitalized on it by promoting the brand had that very power. All the clever advertising in the world doesn’t carry the weight that a friend or trusted personal source has regarding product recommendations. Getting the thumbs up from someone you trust whose opinion comes from experience makes all the difference for most of us. In a report on word-of-mouth advertising, Lithium Technologies looks at its power and how the web and social media has affected it. The report looks at online communities and SNA or Social Network Analysis. For this post, I’ll focus on online communities and address SNA in a follow up post. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community marketing, Word of mouth marketing Tagged With: , ,

Social Media May be Trendy, but Socializing isn’t

Social Media May be Trendy, but Socializing isn't

I first logged on to the internet in 1995 via a BBS AKA Bulletin Board System. I’d been logging onto BBS networks for a couple of years prior. A BBS could be a hobby running on a single home PC or, if you could afford the extra phone lines, a small business venture. The host computers were linked to many others around the globe via the BBS software they ran and phone lines. There were three primary reasons to log into a BBS: file sharing, gaming and communication. Sound familiar? Even now these are three of the primary reasons why people go online – at the heart of all these activities is the need for us to commune and share. When browsers and ISPs made connecting and using the web more accessible for the majority of people, a lot of folks leapt online and spent hours and hours just being online. It was a new frontier and exploring it was addictive for many. I noticed a learning curve that most newcomers to the web experienced. Initially they would spend a lot of time … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community marketing, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Think Tank: Social Media Training for Nonprofits

Think Tank: Social Media Training for Nonprofits

Nonprofits and associations have to make the most out of the meager resources they have at hand. Rarely do they have the wherewithal to hire consultants or new people to take on such things as social media. Those new responsibilities usually fall to someone already overloaded or to volunteers. In either case, the result is often a steep learning curve and more than a little frustration and stress. For example, my sister works for a major humanitarian charity and their social media work is being handled by a junior staff member who is learning as they go. But where do you learn this stuff as you go? One option for nonprofits is Think Tank. Their mission is to help those in associations and nonprofits learn how to leverage social media for success. Their knowledge base features step-by-step guides, on demand Q&A, monthly virtual learning sessions and peer-to-peer discussions. You can watch a quick introduction and overview of what Think Tank can do for you in a quick video … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community marketing, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

The Marketing Power of Online Communities

The Marketing Power of Online Communities

When many in the corporate world hear the words “online community”, they scratch their heads and wonder exactly what that is. Even if they know what an online community is, they may well be intimidated by the idea of managing one. I call that the “new puppy effect”. Bringing home a new puppy is a big commitment and time consuming and it’s fair to wonder if you have the resources to handle it. However, the fundamental truth that you should understand is that communities drive the web. Social media isn’t an adjunct of the web, it’s the natural evolution of it. Online communities were the spark which created the internet and the engine which continues to power it. If you have a blog which features user comments, then you have a foundation for an online community. If you are on Twitter or Facebook then you have the potential for an online community. These constructs are much like reefs are for fish – once the reef is built, the community forms around them. If that … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Brand marketing, Community marketing, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , ,

The Power of @

Online marketing : Power of @

All hail the "Grand Pubah" of typographic symbols: the “@”!  This thought came to mind the other evening when it occurred to me that this symbol has leapt out of obscurity to common use in the last decade. It has come from the humble origins of the commercial and accounting invoice and risen to be the internet equivalent of “Super Glue”. If you’re reading this, you use the “at” symbol every day to connect. It is the digital equivalent of the Dickensian doorknocker – it even resembles that antiquated device slightly. It’s become so common it’s sometimes substituted for the very word “at”. From email to Twitter to forums and blogs the “@” symbol is more important than even the almighty period; end of sentence. Considering the abuse grammar takes at my hands and others, I wonder how our English teachers can stand it. Almost like Elvis, all it took was for one guy to pluck it from obscurity in 1971 and a star was born. Raymond Tomlinson came up with the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Brand marketing, Community marketing, Opinion, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

The Chicken, the Egg and the Internet

The Chicken, the Egg and the Internet

I had a very interesting conversation with John Caldwell of Red Pill Email Marketing the other day. In all honesty, I don’t have many uninteresting conversations with John. He’s someone I consider to be both a source for sober second thought and a thought provocateur. Recently we found ourselves in the midst of a “chicken and the egg” discussion regarding the internet, communities and communication. Did the internet start up because of communities or did it start up and flourish because of the need for more efficient means of communication? At the core of this question is something I’ve preached for many years: The internet is driven by communities and without them it’s just one big strip-mall with infinite parking. You probably know the story of how the roots of the internet grew from a DARPA project to connect computers at such places as NORAD HQ, the Pentagon and SAC. But did those seeds take root because the people involved needed to communicate and then the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community marketing, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Successful Ways To Create User And Community Involvement

community

Communication today is all about creating engagement and involvement and to create experiences for the individual user or receiver. This is also the case for the many organizations, brands or companies who want to get their messages across on the web. People get more and more used to being bombarded with messages more or less everywhere possible: in urban space, in buses, in public toilets, when checking your Facebook etc. So the challenge for communicators and marketers is to create new and engaging ways to reach the audience – in other words: to involve the users. Get in your audience’s shoes In order to create user involvement, as a communicator you need to get into the habit of prioritizing your audience. You shouldn’t only be involved in your own products or services even though your ultimate goal may to be get this across. But in order for you to create successful communication, you need to place yourself in the shoes of your audience, … [Read more...]

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Four Essential Community Building and Engagement Tips

community and networking concept

The world of social media has presented some unique opportunities not just to marketers, but to community organizers and communicators. While 'community' is becoming the online business world's hottest buzzword, building a community is not limited to people with a product to market -- it can be a remarkable opportunity for entrepreneurs who are still deciding on a product, non-profit groups looking to unite passionate people, and of course, marketers looking to connect with a wide audience. These four methods will help you build a community (or more precise: nurture and engage it since a community often exists without you knowing it), connect with your users, and create social media 'permission marketing' assets: 1. Bundle your best content with your community. It is hard to predict what will 'tip' and what won't in the online world. The best strategy for ensuring that community can gather around your best content is to always provide a platform for it to grow. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community marketing, Word of mouth marketing Tagged With: