Last week I gave a talk to the Norcal BMA about “Six Social Media Strategies You Can Start Today”.

All the strategies I shared were designed to meet this simple business objective: Increase awareness of my company with my target customer base.

The strategies are:

• Blogging
• Blogger outreach
• Video
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Forum Interaction

10…11…12… strategies

My talk evolved from a white paper that I hope to publish here on the site, if I ever find the time to finish it. My original title was “Ten Ways to Get Started in Social Media”. In addition to the six topics in my talk, I’ll be adding Wikipedia, LinkedIn groups, Facebook App, Facebook Connect, Flickr, and iPhone app. Who knows how many strategies I’ll have by the time I’m done.

After I finished the talk, someone came up to me and said, “I was surprised you didn’t mention Ning.”

“Aha!” I replied. “Ning is an excellent service, and I didn’t mention it for two very specific reasons.” Ning, by the way, is a platform you can use to create your own social network for free.

• “First, creating a community is not a beginner strategy. It’s more advanced.
• “Second, communities are not typically useful for increasing awareness for your company. They serve other objectives very well, (customer support and brand loyalty, for example) but not that objective.”

Carecourses – Does a community meet their objective?

I’ll explain more by sharing an example with you. I have a good friend who is the owner of a company, Carecourses, which provides distance learning courses to childcare providers. Carecourses offers over 50 different courses and has trained over 100,000 childcare providers.

I recently talked to my friend about her desire to develop a community for her customers. “That’s great,” I told her. “A community will build loyalty among your customers, and keep them coming back to Carecourses.”

“We don’t really need to increase customer loyalty,” she responded. “Once someone takes our courses, they realize that they are the most interesting, highest quality, easiest, and least expensive way to get their annual hours. So typically, our customers stay with us for life.

“Our challenge is to get people over the hurdle of trying distance learning. Many people have a perception that distance learning – correspondence courses – are lower quality than classroom learning. Those people won’t even try our courses.”

“Here’s the problem: ” I told her, “if someone isn’t even willing to try distance learning, they’re certainly not going to sign up for a community about distance learning.”

Typically, the people who join a community are those who are ALREADY fans or customers. Getting people to join your community usually requires advertising – perhaps piggybacked on advertising you’re already doing. Of course, there are exceptions to this – communities like Ravelry (a knitting community) which has grown virally, but the chances of hitting viral success are small, and the investment is very high.

My advice for Carecourses – and for anyone trying to reach non-customers in their target market– is to leverage existing communities that are already successful (and someone else has paid to develop) and match your target demographic. For Carecourses, I suggested CafeMom, since most childcare providers are also moms. Within CafeMom, Carecourses could pay to advertise or start a group. They could try my “forum interaction” technique – answer questions raised by others, on a regular basis, and use a signature line with the Carecourses tagline and web link.

Facebook and the Customer Testimonial

My friend also pointed out that Carecourses gets lots of customer testimonials, but those don’t always make a difference with skeptics. Great point, and one that shows why Facebook is such a powerful force – testimonials have much more impact if they come from someone you know. By creating a Facebook fan page (which is not a community – but that’s another post) and recruiting existing customers to become fans, their loyalty – a testimonial in itself – is shared with their friends automatically via their newsfeed. These personal testimonials on Facebook carry more weight than a lengthy story by a stranger.

If you have loyal fans, a Facebook fan page will help spread the testimonials throughout your existing customer base’s network.

My friend is pretty sharp – check out the Carecourses Facebook Fan page!

What do you think? Have you seen communities increase awareness and bring in new customers?

Share on Facebook
Bookmark this on Delicious