In a previous post, I talked about some reasons why a brand might consider setting up a social media community.  This time around, I’m going to touch on a few points a brand needs to keep in mind whenever it’s drawing up the plans and laying the foundations for its own social media community.

Whenever your brand is creating its community, there needs to be an established reason for its existence beyond simple marketing.  There also needs to be a genuine caring by your brand for the community it creates, a desire to nourish it and encourage its growth among its members.  Members should also feel they have a role and a stake in the community’s development.

As the community is being developed, your consumer base should be engaged using some means of feedback delivery—polls, surveys, and the like—to allow their thoughts and suggestions to be heard.  With this information in hand, you’ll be able to act upon user wants and needs to steer the community’s direction as it takes shape and grows. (more…)

Taking advantage of earned media—the extra exposure that comes when consumers talk about your brand online and off—hinges on actually getting these consumers motivated enough to talk about your brand in the first place.  A social media community can be a way to generate this conversion.  With it, you can provide your consumer base with a place to talk about your brand as well as help those who might be interested in your brand learn more about it, hopefully affecting their purchase-making decisions.

While your brand might already have sites and user forums dedicated to it and serving as gathering places for consumers to share their brand experiences, establishing your own online community provides your brand enthusiasts with a direct means to interact with and learn about your brand, adding to your credibility among your consumer fan base.  It also enables your social site as a valued online destination because your brand will be able to provide the kind of firsthand information that other fan-operated social media sites cannot.
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This year marks the tenth anniversary of B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore’s essential book, The Experience Economy, in which the authors encouraged businesses to orchestrate memorable events for their customers rather than simply charging for a product or service.  They argued that a memory is what the customer is actually buying and the more pleasant the memory, the stronger the brand attachment.

We marketers tend to bandy the word “experience” around quite a bit.  And while I think that Pine & Gilmore’s shift from service to experience economy was right on target, it might be worth contemplating how the definition of “positive experience” has changed over the last decade.

This is a big topic but overall, an excellent customer experience is the marriage of brand performance and customer enthusiasm.  The courtship for this marriage is a delicate dance—you can’t maximize brand performance without understanding customer perspective, and brands also can’t be all things to all people.  So what can brands do right now to engage in the dance and create a blissful union?

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There were a few things that Pine and Gilmore couldn’t or didn’t predict.  The great recession, free market doubts, and the consumer generated media tour de force made business in the 00 decade more serious and less freewheeling than in the 90s.  So while $200 American Girl tea parties represented the experience economy of 2000, a customer’s definition of “good experience” has probably changed. (more…)

With the start of 2010, it’s time to look ahead.  We asked some of our bloggers to tell us what they wished would happen in the coming year.  Not predictions, just wishes.  So here are some of the things they’d like to see in this brand new year:

Suzanne Beane, Director, Cincinnati Office
In 2010, I’d like to be talking to more clients about how to study and nurture the Hispanic market.  The sheer numbers of minorities in urban areas and beyond necessitates that marketers consider this very important demographic each time they craft a message and devise a media strategy.  This goes beyond including images of Hispanic consumers and developing a Spanish version of the web site.  There are certain cultural traditions and viewpoints that we should become familiar with when we speak to Hispanic-Americans.  The tipping point for when the non-Hispanic white population becomes a minority group isn’t supposed to occur until 2050, but the accumulated purchasing power in the next 40 years makes the Hispanic conversation worth having right now.

Lori Druen, Vice President Client Services
Mine’s pretty straight forward, especially given the needs and wants of the clients I work with every day.  I wish in 2010 that analytics tools become even more sophisticated in tracking social media directly to ROI.

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