At first, this sentence doesn’t make so much sense… But it’s more or less the kind of things I have been hearing in the past few months.
I give you the logic: online communities and social networks have never been so popular, and people go increasingly online to socialize. So… brands should build their own community to talk to their customers.
Am I the only one to see the slip of logic here?
Engagement is about relevance. Asking someone to join yet another community when there are so many interesting new ones out there every day is not relevant. It’s a waste of your customers’ time.
Conversations are before all spontaneous and authentic. A community starts with a common interest that brings people together. That common interest provides context for the community to exist. My conversations on Wannasurf and AsmallWorld are not the same. Paying someone everyday to post a blog about your deodorant is not what I call an authentic conversation. Spending a fortune to have a cool design will not provide context. If incentives are your only way to make your community relevant, why don’t you just stick to quantitative research, there is something called “open ends” that helps you collect a large number of qualitative insights very easily, as long as you read them. Paying someone to spend time with your private community is not engagement, it’s corruption.
A message to brands: people are not waiting for your authorization to talk about you. They don’t need to be in your community to talk about you. In fact, they are talking about you right now.
So, if you want to listen and observe kids, you don’t need to organize a party yourself, and even less to build walls and hope that they will come and party. In fact, you don’t even need to organize the party yourself, because it will probably be lame anyway (Wal-Mart, you know what I am talking about - at least you failed early). So just join the party yourself and look around you! There are so many exciting things marketers can do to leverage existing communities and networks…
PS: a tip for brands. Don’t reinvent the wheel. If you just need a social network and let your customers share photos, videos, blogs etc, just create a Ning account and have your own MySpace in 20 minutes. Add $5 per month and you have it on your own domain. Now you have your own walls social network, and you saved a lot of money to do something useful with it.
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