Who Cares about Community?
Yesterday I spent an entire day at The Crosby Club in Rancho Sante Fe talking to business owners and members of the BBB about community building. For most, the term “social media” was completely foreign to them, and for the rest, they were having trouble wrapping their minds around why they should care. One of the mantras I repeat incessantly is that…
Your customers, your clients, your employees, and anyone else associated with your brand – they’re all taking and now, more than ever, they’re talking about you, your business, and your brand, and they’re doing it online regardless of whether or not you’re listening, or whether or not you care.
As I started to think about how I could help the less tech savvy audience wrap their minds around why, at the very least, they need to pay attention to social media sites like Twitter, something obvious struck me.
Brands are to community as parents are to children. Brands need to pay attention to what’s being said about them online in exactly the same way that parents need to pay close attention to their young children.
Community Building Happens Through Social Media
Social media is the marriage of social networks and digital media; it’s sharing and connecting your content with your online circle of friends. Digital media encompasses everything from digital photos to Facebook status updates – it’s just content that is either created or hosted online. Social media builds on digital media by making the sharing of all content fast, easy, rewarding, public, and likely to be indexed by Google.
At the very core of social media is community building. People use social networks to connect, exchange ideas, and ultimately add depth to the various types of relationships we have with our online friends. What you put into your online network is directly correlated to what you get out of it. The same holds true for brands and companies who are trying to engage with their customers online. Building a relationship takes time, commitment, and honesty. The challenge for brands, however, is that the customer community exists whether or not a brand chooses to engage with it.
Brand: Community, Parent:Child
Let’s explore the brand:community, parent:child analogy a little more. A parent is by definition a parent only when there is a child in question. The same holds true for brands, a brand doesn’t exist unless there is a community of people who support that brand. A parent is responsible for taking care of their child, for nurturing him/her, and for guiding that child to make smart decisions. A brand doesn’t have the same responsibilities that a parent has to a child, but a brand will suffer the same consequences if they ignore their community as a parent will suffer if they ignore their child.
Let’s say a mom is incredibly tired and decides to take a nap. While she’s sleeping, her two year-old child reeks havoc on the house, destroys the yard, and finally falls down and starts to scream. When the mom awakes she’s confronted with an impossible challenge – comfort her screaming child and try to bring the chaos back to order. Now take that child, multiply him/her by hundreds of thousands, put them all in the same vicinity, and you’ve got a really ugly mess on your hands. This is what is happening online. Your customers are screaming for attention, but you can’t hear them because you’re not listening.
Listening is the First Step
Yesterday a very grumpy golfer overheard my explanation of social media as a resource for listening and engaging with your customer/client community. He mumbled under his breathe that he didn’t want to talk to his customers and that he gets enough email as it is. There are so many reasons why he’s wrong, but his rumblings sent so many messages that I think are more important. First and foremost, he doesn’t care and he doesn’t want to listen. I wonder why he’s getting all those emails, perhaps it’s because there’s a general attitude that listening is an inconvenience for him. So he can choose not to listen and continue on his path of stubbornness, but those emails won’t ever stop, and the bad attitude won’t ever change.
In the bigger picture, using social media to listen is the simpliest thing a company can do to get a clearer picture of that big ugly mess described above. Choosing not to listen is a choice either motivated by ignorance or laziness – but the world we live in today is a Google world, so wake up! That big ugly mess is now being indexed on Google for the entire world to see. Don’t you at least want to know what it looks like?
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DowntownRob
