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Did you know that there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day – so much that 90% of all the world’s data was created in the last 2 years? Did you know that 17 terabytes of that data are on Twitter and Facebook? This means that your customers have access to more information than ever before – information about you, your competitors and your product category in general.
They can buy your product without ever talking to you, and can be swayed by competitive messaging if their experience with you is not worth hanging onto. Information and products are becoming more and more of a commodity. The Deloitte Shift Index tells us that competitive intensity has more than doubled over the past 40 years. All in all, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out and maintain your value proposition with customers.
What isn’t a commodity? Relationships are that magic sauce that encourage customer loyalty and help cushion against competitive threats. When someone has a stronger relationship with you, he/she is also more open to messages from you and will prioritize information coming from you over the other 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. But relationship building in traditional channels is hard – it takes time and it doesn’t scale very well. Communities drastically help you scale your relationship building – between you and your customers and partners, as well as peer relationships between your customers – without losing intimacy and authenticity.
Direct access to their peers helps your customers use the product in new and interesting ways, access to agent and peer support shortens service times, and communicating a message at scale becomes a breeze. Doing everything in the open dramatically accelerates your business and the businesses of your customers and partners. Having an open and honest relationship with you and their peers creates a competitive differentiator that helps them choose you over your competitors every time. As a result of all this, customers in communities spend more – 19% more, says University of Michigan!
While selecting the right technology platform for your community is of critical importance, it’s not the only thing to consider. Successful communities create the conditions where members choose to spend time with each other, and work together. There are three main elements to this: shared values (what your members value), shared purpose (what they’re working on) and shared ownership (having built the community together). A good community manager designs the community space to ensure that all three elements are present, and that members are incentivized to contribute, while deriving the right amount of value.
Building a community is like building a garden: it doesn’t happen overnight, it needs careful planning, and daily nurturing to build trust and create shared ownership and purpose. While this can seem overwhelming, it doesn’t need to be. Community building is a process of evolution; you’ll discover what you need to do along the way. But to help you get started, we boiled down the fundamentals into 5 broad steps:
We’ll be going into depth on each of these steps in our webinar this Thursday, June 27th at 11 a.m. PST. Make sure to sign up and join myself, Hans Schaedel from Canto, Inc. and Erica Kuhl from Salesforce for an educational discussion around building thriving communities that delight members and deliver business value.
