When you have a group of consumers who all share an interest in a certain line of products, you have a target market, and when those consumers are able to interact and influence each other, you have a community. Electronic commerce does more than let you conduct transactions -- it connects you with consumers.
The Internet has made more than just e-commerce possible. It also made it possible for consumers with similar interests from all over the world to connect with one another and interact. This means that there are all these markets that are already targeted for you. The only catch for some marketers is that the same technology that’s prepackaged these markets for you has also allowed their members to form into communities.
A successful e-commerce operation, then, requires more than marketing. It requires that you engage and contribute to already existing communities. It requires community relations.
56 percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
The New ROI: Return on Influence
When we need to make a purchasing decision about a product we don’t know much about, we ask someone we think does know. If we don’t know anyone like that, we can turn online and look for reviews by independent third parties.
The point is that we are influenced by those who have first-hand experience and/or are active in a relevant community. We are social creatures and are more likely to trust information when it comes from an independent source that we can connect and interact with.
A piece of corporate copy is an inanimate object, and we know that its purpose is to influence us for someone else’s gain. It might benefit us at the same time, but it might not.
An actual human being, however, exists for more reasons than to just promote a product. Like us, they want to connect, interact and share what they’ve learned through their experience.
Trust Economies
People don’t buy from companies -- they buy from people. If a person already trusts your brand, then the next time they’re looking for a product that you sell, they are already open to buying from you.
But how do you get them to trust you? Simple: by investing in a trust economy.
A trust economy is what happens when people defer to you whenever they’re looking for an authority that they can engage on a personal level.
I may or may not trust the opinions of the expert to whom a publishing house gave a book deal. After all, the publishing house makes money by selling that book, and they sell that book by hyping the author.
But I will surely trust the opinions of an expert that I can interact with directly because, one, that opinion is not incentivized, and two, that opinion is in response to my inquiry and catered to my interaction.
The point is that we trust people who help us out without profiting from it. The reason is that if they’ve given us something for free, it’s probably because they’re acting on a human impulse to be social and share their experience. And if they have that impulse, that means we can connect with them.
Getting Social and Building Communities
If you’re going to establish a trust economy, you’re going to have to be social. It’s impossible, however, to go out there and introduce yourself to each and every one of your potential customers. What you can do, though, is participate in a community.
Before a community will rally around your brand, your brand has to become a respected and valued member of that community. Just like markets exist independently of a company, communities already exist independently of your brand. So it’s not so much a question of building a community around your brand as it is of building up your brand’s reputation within a community.
Communities can be a powerful trust-building tool because they provide members with added value -- no strings attached. Not only do members get to access the community’s resources, but they get to connect and interact with other community members -- other real people -- and collectively determine the value of those resources.
When members do that, two things happen: information becomes more trustworthy because it’s open to collective scrutiny, and members develop a sense of ownership over the community. When they turn to the community for help, they’re turning to something they’ve helped build and are proud of. People tend to have confidence in what they’re proud of.
The way to become a respected member of a community is by participating in it. And you participate in a community by adding value to it.
Giving to Communities
Every community has unique needs. If your brand is going to add value to a community, then it needs to determine what the needs of that community are.
More often than not, there are two things that all communities need: energy and attention. If sales-based marketing is like hunting, then community-based marketing is like farming.
To make a meaningful contribution to a community, you first need to invest the energy it takes to show that you’re as passionate about the community as its other members. Disinterested, passive participation will not earn you any influence with other members.
Secondly, you need to pay attention to what really interests the community. Remember, the community exists independently of you and your brand. As passionate as you are, you cannot dictate what the community wants. Rather, you must pay attention to and show an interest in what’s already on the community’s collective mind.
Community Management
Just because you build a community, it doesn’t mean that members will come. Like a farm, building relationships and trust takes time, and like a crop, they will wither if you start to neglect them.
Many niche social networks fail because they never make the transition from platform to community. Giving someone a new way to interact doesn’t mean they’ll use it. For example, you can teach me Esperanto, but if there’s no incentive to speak it, the language is dead.
Adding value is more than just giving a gift. If you give someone something once, you’ll be easily forgotten. If you want your community-based initiative to be successful, you need to energetically engage members on a regular basis, and pay attention to their feedback by putting it toward further community development.