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In my previous entry, Why 50% isn’t Good Enough, I discussed why one would spend their time, money and efforts on their community, rather than advertising or PR. In this article, I discuss the how, where and when of doing this.

We’ve all heard of the ‘evangelist’ title that’s given to people inside and outside of organizations who are passionate about a specific product or service. Evangelists are incredibly powerful. They provide excellent feedback, are the key to peer-to-peer recommendation of your company and they also energize a community to a point where it is a great place to be.

What is that magic ingredient that turns people from ‘consumers’ of your software into active and enthusiastic evangelists? The truth is that there is no single magic ingredient, but there are some underlying principles to delighting your current customers that may just lay the groundwork to creating an evangelist or two.

Principle #1. Become a community evangelist

How can you expect people to get behind you unless you get behind their needs first? Who are you designing your software for anyway? Your VCs? Your own fame and fortune? The cool kids who won’t give your site the time of day? Sure, if you want to host a barren wasteland. But if you want a thriving, growing community, you need to put the needs of those who are there already ahead of everyone else.

If you’re getting negative feedback from those using your site it’s a pretty good indication that there are people who care enough to provide it to you. Don’t get defensive, get responsive. The single biggest mistake of new entrepreneurs is that they take criticism of their software personally. Sure, not all feedback should be integrated, but it pays to hear people out and discuss various options for solving their issues. In fact, your biggest critics can turn into your biggest fans.

Principle #2. Design to delight

There are plenty of great articles on Vitamin that help you with this, but a really good rule of thumb to stick with is that details should not be overlooked. In fact, scaling back on the features (especially upon first launch) and concentrating on making each step of the process delightful (i.e. the language on the error pages, the ease of the signup process, and so on) is essential.

There is a great deal of competition in the online application space right now. We certainly can’t compete on price (since most everything is free), so we need to compete on experience. Take a look at every application that you can’t live without and go through each step. What you will most likely discover is that the designers have sacrificed features for detail.

Principle #3. Embrace the chaos

Too much planning can be as deadly as too little. There is one thing you will learn over time about community: people rarely behave the way you think they will. The more nimble you are, the more vulnerable you are, but the more ready you will be to react to any situation that arises.

Planned for 20,000 people to join day 1 and only 2,000 signed up? Great – it gives you more time to spend with those who come in. Or, the opposite happens and you plan for 2,000 and 20,000 sign up and take down your servers. It’s an ideal chance to reach out and thank everyone for the overwhelming response, then apologize for not being prepared.

Principle #4. Find your higher purpose

Higher purpose? Huh? At Citizen Agency, we won’t work with a company unless they have a higher purpose. I know that sounds harsh, but a company born to merely make money or achieve some sort of notoriety for the CEO won’t have the community’s interest at heart.

We, ourselves, started out with a higher purpose (which we always come back to): giving a voice to the customer. I want to turn marketing on its head, to humanize it and reduce its negative impact. Chris wants to create a world of engaged individuals.

A higher purpose isn’t just a ‘nice to have’; it becomes your mantra, your mission statement and your grounding point for everything you do. It keeps you real and ethical. To find your business’s higher purpose, all you need to do is think about how you want to be remembered. What kind of mark do you want to leave on the earth (besides fame and fortune)? You’ll find your higher purpose there.

Principle #5. Get focused.

Once you have found your higher purpose, you are ready to get your strategy focused around it. I’ve always been a fan of Marcus Buckingham’s list of leadership questions, which I have appropriated as a focus exercise for our clients:

1. Who do we serve? (pick one specific core group)
2. What is our core strength? (why would they give a darn?)
3. What is our core score? (a metric of success)
4. What actions can we take today to get there?

There have been too many situations where we’ve taken on a client whose ‘audience’ includes all males, ages 18-45, and females from the ages of 18-29 – white, middle-class, university educated, etc… Everyone seems to want the mainstream. But what is the mainstream? And have any companies who are ‘mainstream’ actually started there (especially with a small promotional budget)? Nope. Wal-mart is Buckingham’s favorite example of this. Who do they serve? People who live paycheck to paycheck. Only. Everyone else is welcome to shop there, but what they stock, how they present themselves, how they price, merchandise and greet… that is all grounded in their core audience.

Principle #6. Inbound rather than outbound communications

This one is tough. Really tough. Even I struggle with this. If I can’t shout about what I’m doing from the rooftops, who will know? Well, arguably, writing this article is an outbound tool of promotion. But I was asked to write for Vitamin because I built a relationship with the great people at Carson Systems first. I didn’t send them endless emails, pitching them on the possibility. I kept writing valuable articles on my own blog and my traffic kept increasing. I built relationships with everybody who came to my blog, listening to their feedback, incorporating their comments and spending loads of time emailing back and forth suggestions.

Having a blog isn’t about broadcasting – or at least it shouldn’t be. It is about opening up a channel of communication between you and your community. It gives people a chance to get to know you. It gives them a way to communicate with you. Don’t stop at a blog, though. Post your email, your IM, your photo URL, on forums, wikis and any other site that you can receive messages through. Answer your emails. You’ll be amazed at what you will learn from this level of interaction.

Principle #7. Put community first.

Don’t have time to concentrate on your community? Too busy coding and meeting with investors? Craig Newmark still answers all of his customer emails himself. He insists on it: it keeps him close to the needs of his community.

If you don’t have time for your community, you may lose it. Hire extra help. Make it part of everyone’s jobs in the organization. Whatever you have to do, just make those relationships your priority.

Principle #8. Be part of the community you serve

Some companies hire outside firms to interact with their community members. This is okay, but not ideal, because the relationships being built are between your community and a third party. Although it is perfectly fine to have someone come in and consult on the steps for you to take to reach out to your community, actually reaching out should be done by you and your internal team (consultants can be part of it, but not the only part of it).

An obvious way to do this is to use your own software, interacting with your community members – if you have a photo sharing site, comment on photos, add people as friends, personally welcome them and interact with them along the way. You will not only build bonds, but you will also find your own bugs and realize where your software needs to go next. Don’t just use it casually, use it religiously.

If you want to take it a step further, learn more about your community. Where else do they hang out? Online? Offline? Do they attend meetups? Schwag? Are there standards organizations around what you are doing? Hang out in the wider community and get to know your audience, your competitors and the various people working in the space. You’ll be amazed at what you may find.

Principle #9. Remember the tripod: Environment, Product & Community

Marketing isn’t something you do after you create a product, it is a function of everyone on your team and at every step of your process. We take a tripod approach to community marketing:

Environment

Nothing happens in a vacuum. What works one day may be a disaster the next for various reasons. Is the technology too far advanced? Months behind? How many competitors are in the space? Are they seeing pick-up? Why or why not? What are the world events? Are you dealing with touchy political matters? What came before? Why didn’t it last? What mistakes can you learn from there? What did they do right?

The environment you are in cannot be changed, but it can be made aware of. We watch history repeat itself way too often. To save time, money and heartache, take a good look around you.

Product

It is much easier to gain acceptance of a good product. So, what makes a good product?

• User flows
• Design
• Low barriers of entry
• interoperation
• Stability
• Speed
• The right features
• Attention to detail

There are oodles of other factors that are harder to pinpoint and sometimes it just requires loads of real user testing and feedback gathering. Other times, it requires sticking to a vision.

Either way, product development is an ongoing and tricky process and has to be balanced with both the environment and the community around it.

Community

The input to this leg of the tripod is communications, the output is community. How available are you to feedback? How simple do you make it for people to interact with you and other community members? How often and well do you communicate with your members? Are you keeping everyone in the loop with upcoming changes?

Community and communications go hand-in-hand.

We look at it as a balanced tripod because not every situation will be the same. Environment will effect the balance of product and community, and there is always a delicate balance between product and community itself.

Principle #10. Have patience.

Above all else, building relationships takes time. Trust doesn’t happen overnight and trust is essential to any real relationship. Anything less is fleeting and unstable. Advertising, PR and mass emails can get a company fleeting attention and, if your product is outstanding, may even stick with those who give it a whirl. However, in today’s crowded space, even outstanding products have outstanding competition. The best way to long-term growth is through building real relationships with your community members – and it has to be personal.

The beautiful thing about building relationships is the impact is real and overwhelming when it does happen… and it is quite scalable. Your delighted community members can become your ambassadors. Building relationships is also incredibly good for the soul!

Now, remember that even if you employ all of these principles, you may still have a difficult time building those relationships. Could it be the environment? Your product? Maybe even your reputation? Perhaps there is just someone in the space who has captured the hearts of many and moving into that space creates tension. But, unlike spending oodles on advertising, you’ll have spent hours of time down in the trenches, hopefully learning from what is going on around you.

The next article in this series will be about how NOT to build communities and signs of ‘unhealthy’ interactions, as well as how to rectify difficult situations.

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Marketing is one of those words that more often than not, gives engineers hives. Use ‘marketing’ in a presentation at a technology conference and expect every subsequent word to be met with suspicion. I certainly don’t blame people for distrusting marketers. We have a long history of being smarmy and despicable.

I spent the first part of my career trying to come to grips with being a marketer. I actually found the study of marketing and communications fascinating, especially the cultural studies. The understanding was that people were unique and influenced by their personal experiences, and that it was more beneficial to build relationships and learn from these individuals than it was to try and push messages repeatedly until someone picked them up.

However, when I entered the advertising world, that kind of attitude was frowned upon. It wasn’t ’scalable’ and it took too long to accomplish anything. The ROI on a billboard was simple: such and such numbers of eyeballs would suck in the message daily, leading to a certain percentage of others ‘acting on’ that message. It was up to us as a creative team to make that message as compelling and memorable as possible.

But something sat wrong with me in that model. It seemed that there was a huge amount of time and money squandered. It was sort of a ‘throw the paint on the wall and see what sticks’ mentality. The wasted paint was just a part of the equation. There is actually an infamous quote in advertising that “Half of all advertising is wasted, we just don’t know which half.”

Compounded with the waste, I just didn’t see any long-term benefits from these campaigns. Sure, you may arrest someone’s attention with an ad that catches them in the subway. They may even be influenced to buy a product or service from it. But these advertising messages have little or nothing to do with the products themselves. They are brainstormed in an agency boardroom, with a team of people often different from those who designed the product. “We care about you” often results in another poor customer experience.

After enough experience with marketing messages misaligned to actual experience, people have grown to totally disregard these messages altogether. And this was years before ’social software’ allowed for word of mouth and peer-to-peer to travel like wildfire around the globe.

Then I read a book that changed my life. Actually, I read a website that was also a published book. The Cluetrain Manifesto, written as a series of philosophical rants by Doc Searls, Christopher Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine, really hit home for me. Their first thesis, “markets are conversations” summed it all up for me. The future of marketing was not about pushing messages or yelling or broadcasting… they were about having a two-way conversation with your customers.

What Will These Conversations Do For You?

That is where companies get it wrong. It isn’t about you at all. It is about your user/customer. I could go on with the benefits of building relationships rather than SEO campaigns, such as:

1. Longevity and customer retention, not to mention repeat customers

2. Bug tracking and community policing (ie. Flickr’s ‘Flag this photo as “may offend”?’)
3. Amplified word of mouth
4. Built in market research
5. Buying ads is bloody expensive

But I won’t. I could tell you that if you don’t have those conversations, you will probably end up making decisions along the way that will make those few customers you have go away to someone who is listening. But I won’t say that either.

Because you don’t need to know those things. You really have no choice in the matter. You can’t afford not to have that conversation. The only thing that is standing between you and your customers is a blog, a forum, a clearer way of providing feedback, opening up your bug tracking system, or a published email or IM address.

It’s incredibly simple. It’s actually the most natural thing we do. The benefits are immense and it increases customer satisfaction and retention tenfold.

[p.s. it feels darn good, too]

But Is It Scalable?

When you are a humongous corporation with hundreds of customer service staff, you most certainly can empower each and every staff member to empower each and every customer they speak with. You can implement a very expensive customer relationship management system that makes it possible to remember every detail of every transaction and you have the person power to spend individual time with each customer.

But when you are a strappy startup, with three engineers, one non-engineer and an angel-funded project that you give away for free, you don’t have the same resources available to you. So, wouldn’t it be simpler to just buy those ads?

Let me tell you this: scaling issues are the best issues to have. You should be so lucky.

If you need to hire a community manager, you are doing something right. If you need to hire a community team, you seriously rock. There are ways to scale the conversation, and I will talk a bit more about that in future articles, but the first step is opening up those lines of communication today.

How Do You Open Up Communication?

The simplest way to do this is to take a look at how you communicate already. I would never recommend a blog for someone who hates to write or a forum for a group of engineers who have never spent time in one. If you are really efficient with email, put your email address on every page… top and bottom. If you spend all of your time on IM, publish your username on the website.

We’ve advised some of our clients to open up their bug tracking system to the public. Interested parties can see what is being worked on already and add suggestions directly to your process.

Make it incredibly friendly so people feel they can approach you, too. Put photos and bios of all of the members of your team up on your website, with clear contact information. Describe in clear language what ‘part’ of the website everyone is responsible for so customers will know who to contact.

Technology allows us to go further, but this is a start. In the community marketing series that follows this article, I plan to discuss the how of it, the where and when of it, the overall essence of it and the measurement of it.

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