The question that is currently battering around in my head is "Can I find my community or will my community find me?" I'm in a completely new role now and one of the activities we are pushing towards is the development of an online community in which to engage with our users. The folks we are talking with are network engineers inside R&D labs and QA...these are incredibly smart folks and they are not exactly a 'dime a dozen', in fact they are tremendously unique and hard to find. Sounds like a difficult challenge for building a community, right?
Yes, I agree. This is going to be a tremendous challenge, one which I'm looking forward to, but as we push forward I certainly grow anxious. Paul Dunay posted something similar at Marketing Profs, writing at one point:
Ok, here is something I'm wrestling with: Can a community be successful with low brand awareness? If you are a big tech brand like Dell or Microsoft, you have no problem launching a community. In fact, many of these organizations have several communities.
But what if you are a small SaaS vendor? Forget costs for one moment, and resources for another (chuckling) - can you attract enough community members to make it go?
Paul reflects exactly what I'm facing; I know the folks are out there, but do you go out and find them, or create a terrific community (blog, wiki, etc) and they will find you? To be honest I think it is a matter of both and here are the steps we are taking:
- Engage the current user base to discover what they want to discuss, how they want to communicate, their likes, their dislikes...essentially building a "community advisory board";
- Evolve our blog to discuss the overall industry, openly looking at the competition, unveiling our product roadmap for insight and more;
- Leverage our star power;
- Worry more about our content than the social media apps we are using;
I believe this follows the POST method that Forrester discusses, most recently in a terrific webinar sponsored by Mzinga. I'm focusing the next few weeks primarily on People, Objectives and Strategy. The Technology is an after thought, at this point.
Tell me, is this how you would attack this challenge? What am I missing?
-Kyle Flaherty
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