communities

Discovering, Building and Growing Community: Challenge and Opportunity

CHALLENGES FOR COMMUNITY BUILDERS (from forward-thinking leaders):

I wonder what would happen – if we just stopped talking about the crisis (macro-economics) and simply started giving the best service ever to our customers (micro-economics) instead.
~Eleftherios Hatziioannou

Social psychology is more important than economics. ~Peter Economides

All cultures … have grown out of myths. They are founded on myths. What these myths have given has been inspiration for aspiration. The economic interpretation of history is for the birds. Economics is itself a function of aspiration. It’s what people aspire to that creates the field in which economics works. ~Joseph Campbell

The role of purposeful storytelling is to unlock people’s emotions so they can connect to your story and brand. ~Peter Guber

The real opportunity is in reaching out to the dissatisifed, to those in search of something new. ~Seth Godin

DISCOVERING COMMUNITY: One of the most exciting realities of our time is swift connection via digital networks with others who share one’s passion, beliefs and interests. For individuals, such discovery of peers in the social networks often leads to connection in the flesh. Brands have worked for years with technology companies to develop truly amazing solutions for identifying and connecting with individuals, conversations, and existing communities oriented around specific interests. Leaders in the field include PeopleBrowsr, Radian6, BrandWatch and Converseon.

BUILDING COMMUNITY: Powerful communities are often built around dynamic leaders who balance hard-earned lessons in relationship with an appreciation for new knowledge. Increasingly, brand leaders are giving away power to customers – to tell stories, share suggestions, critique corporate leadership, and even design products/services. The result for many brands has been increased loyalty, positive word of mouth and trust. Here are examples of brands that truly demonstrate customer-centric community development in social networks via Lisa Braziel at Ignite (see examples). Two superior tech solutions for building community include Jive and Buddy Media.

NURTURING COMMUNITY: It takes people to truly grow and nurture a long-term community. In social networks, conversations are a major aspect of how people connect, whether in brief texting via Twitter or Facebook, or within long drawn-out comment threads on blogs. A successful brand has community managers on staff who love the brand, are personable, have common sense, understand social technologies and are pro-active in driving community growth. Content-marketing and curation are catch-prhases at this time in history related to growing online communities. Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, is arguably the best resource on curation today. Some of the greatest community managers/social strategists in the industry include Amber Naslund, Eleftherios Hatziioannou, and Jeremiah Owyang.

The Value of Limerence: Community Precedes Commerce

What we know from our very short history of living online is that community precedes commerce; there’s no commerce without community. ~Kevin Kelley

LIMERENCE: Communities fostering “limerence” with their members in digital networks have discovered this simple truth: a desire for interconnection and interaction with other sentient beings drives a majority of searches and relationships in social networks. Investing FIRST in relationship and community leads to positive dividends in terms of customer equity AND market share. The time of the CIRCLE has arrived.

Limerence is the ethos of the Greek god Eros, who arrives where beings need freedom. And need it bad! Eros is a very important figure as related to social networks, which are characterized by the feminine principle of “circling” during crisis. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, writes, “Woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest.” “Psychic relatedness” is a critical factor in the growing of communities within social networks and an important concept to deeply understand for anyone involved in social business.

WHAT IS CIRCLE THINKING? At the core of true circle (social) ethos is the practice of speaking and listening from the heart. When humans are compassionate, heartfelt and empathic, and listen without judgement…when humans engage in non-hierarchical forms of deep communication, a group’s vision and purpose emerges naturally and beautifully.

Circles offer effective means of resolving conflict and for discovering deeper, often unexpressed needs within the hearts of individuals and organizations. Circles foster co-visioning born out of our personal and collaborative stories. Social story-telling is a more accurate method of solving real problems than the political games humans play to survive within strict hierarchies.

Social networks have introduced the global community to collective psychic experiences on an unprecedented scale. The logos of the soul, psychology, implies the act of traveling the soul’s labyrinth in which we can never go deep enough (James Hillman). The entire fabric of human culture, it’s very dimensionality, has undergone a profound shift into an experience of depth and the outcome of such a shift is connection between individuals and communities like never before. It’s a shift toward collaboration and connection.

COLLABORATION: Peter Economides, one of the world’s greatest brand strategists, writes, “Strategy is nothing without a universally compelling, and individually enchanting big idea that engages and aligns people inside and outside the corporation.” We live in times when social strategy teams must lead agencies, brands and entire organizations into new territory of collaboration…territory that binds staff together within through threads of common passion. Such organizations move out into social networks united in a single “heart-ethos” and this is felt in the emotionally-tactile comment-threads and newsfeeds within social networks. As social business teams, we engage in programs that effect the exact same culture change WITHIN the enterprise that we seek in our customer base, in our community, in our customer-facing programs.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY THROUGH COMMUNITY CREATION:

Brands hire Social Agencies to train Community Managers, establish social media policies and then go to the races together for a 1-year period. The GOAL for The Brand is independence from The Agency. It’s time to shift the focus away from “How can we do this fast and cheap?” TO “We’re committed long-term to growing the Brand’s community!”

Every major brand in large markets launching a social campaign should seriously consider performing the following steps:

1. INTEL: Social Intelligence to gather initial insights on what customers are saying, where key influencers locate (and what they are saying) and what content is sticky NOW.
2. STRATEGY: Strategy for a Community Manager built upon Recommendations derived from Insights found through Social Intelligence gathering. Scripting of initial content, creation of a campaign or two, and clever content development are ALL actions to be created at this stage.
3. HR: Hiring of the Community Manager. Agreement on policies.
4. GO: Action! On-going training and deepening of the content and community. Target specific user-groups, such as Mommy Bloggers, through organic community growth via your Community Manager. You need to think of the social networks as parties/gatherings that your Community Manager is walking into and conversing within.

COMMUNITY MANAGER TRAITS AND ACTIONS: The BEST Community Managers are a combo of a Journalist (who writes on the fly, does excellent research and is an investigator) AND a Socializer. Your content-marketing strategy is critical here.

a. Sequence a chronology of content-marketing that makes sense and follows a kind of story.

b. Be a story-teller. Involve people in the story of an employee’s climb to manager, for instance. Or a love story between patrons. Or in the value of having a “third-space” at retail outlets for students OR businessmen. This is where you get creative and give your Community Manager some wings to fly. Sticky content is passed on.

c. Your Community Manager should be involved in conversations, watching for trends in Twitter using monitoring tools and producing attractive content. The result will be an engaged following getting to know one another and forming a positive community around The Brand. Quality Content IN a Quality Context!

On a final note, hierarchies are being replaced by circles EVERYWHERE!!! Start within…you’ve got a hierarchy WITHIN yearning for a circle’s embrace right NOW!! Bring the gift of that inner circle to yourself, your loved ones, your social circles, your work!