Community

 

The next BIG thing is <fill in the blank>!

Immediately you will be thinking “if I only had pound for every time I heard that”.

Everyone seems to be on an agenda these days: trying to sell you a product, a service, an opinion. However, the simplest, most necessary concept to do this seems to be the one that is overlooked by those that are most in need of it. Community.

Small business, everything from something done from the kitchen table all the way up to something approaching a seven figure turn over, is constantly being told it needs to relate more to its audience and connect to it. This is only part of the story though.

 

Your Audience Will Always Be Less Than Its Community

Building a community around your product, service, concept or business, by converting your current audience into a community, will be more profitable in the future than keeping to decades old more traditional broadcasting or narrowcasting strategies.

Now you are asking yourself what’s the difference?

An audience is a group of people who are paying attention to you. This audience listens to you, and sometimes they even respond – with laughter, comments, or by leaving.

A community is a group of people both you and they have bought together interacting with each other. You are not always there and you are certainly not the sole contributor and maybe not even the most prolific contributor.

Email is not a community.

Selling in a store is not a community.

Blogging is not a community.

A social media post comment thread is not a community (but it’s getting closer).

The key to producing a community is having open conversation around your general theme so that people feel they are able to fully express themselves. This is when the magic of a community starts to come out.

1. Your customers will tell you what’s wrong with your products (while talking to others)
2. Your customers will discuss within themselves what products or features they want
3. Your customers will show you their language – they will let you see how they talk, and therefore how you should talk to them.
4. You can easily grab your customers’ attention to market to them, because you’ve aggregated all your customers into one spot, and they enjoy hanging out in that spot.

When you build a community, customers and prospective customers will engage with your brand in a generally more positive way. Meaning they will become more passionate fans of your business and see themselves as “partners in the solution” because they are being allowed to openly express themselves about a topic they care about, and you made that happen. When you hand the mic over to someone else, people tend to not just like that but respect that.

 

So if there is one big next thing in and from 2016, it will be the growth of community building and community management, especially for startups and small businesses. SEJAG is well placed to use all its experience to make this vision a reality.