If there’s one thing that raises my hackles in the social media world then it’s the over-use of the word ‘community’ – says the man who’s just written a chapter on some of the different ones you can address.

To me, mostly a community has active participants and if I’m identified as part of an online community I expect to be contributing to it with blog posts, looking at Facebook pages and probably contributing to them or at least chucking in the odd relevant Tweet. I expect, overall, at least to be aware I’m a member of one community or another.

Unfortunately it’s a term with which we’re a bit stuck, and it becomes even more nebulous when you’re trying to build up your customer base. The ‘community’ of prospective customers is probably clear to you but they have yet to give their consent to take part in any sort of cohesive group.

So for our purposes a ‘community’ is a loose grouping of people and that grouping is mostly in the eye of the beholder. The job seekers’ community might become your target, or the wine buff community, or just about any other sort of community – it doesn’t mean they know each other or that they identify themselves as any sort of distinct bunch of people.

It’s a useful concept in marketing terms. It means you can stratify your approach and start to regard clients and prospects as a cohesive bunch of people. And then turn them into regular customers and hopefully into advocates for your brand.

In this chapter you will:

• Learn to think about and address ‘communities’ and what this actually means in practical terms
• Select the right social media to address these communities and harness their online behaviours accordingly
• Turn them from passive recipients of social media into more active members and hopefully brand advocates
• Learn to take the ‘world wide’ bit out of ‘world wide web’ and make it local again
• Build local customer communities
• Make people feel involved and therefore motivated to come back
• Select the right social media to address those people and get them addressing each other
• Make your service feel completely personalized.

So, what sort of communities do your customers belong to? No, I’m not talking about basic demographics – white, black, Asian, male, female; these will all help you target the right people to an extent but there’s more. Age groups will also help you target people and nobody is saying you should ever lose sight of those marketing basics – they’re still important.

The great advantage of online communities is that since people log on in their hundreds of thousands if not millions, you can be really granular about who you’re targeting. Never mind looking at the male, middle-aged community; how about the male middle-aged community which is interested in moisturiser, cologne, and other personal care products but which doesn’t want to go to feminine-looking sites or end up trawling the gay community’s sites? That’s how I define the community for my LifeOver35.com blog.

Then there are communities around particular interests. The job-seeking community is one which has unfortunately had very good reasons to be quite lively in recent years; in the bricks and mortar world you have job centres and head-hunting operations as well as a few employment bureaux and a massive industry in advertising vacancies.

Online, by adding social ‘tags’ to a set of jobs, you could make sure you’re targeting the job-seeking professional PA community, or the job-seeking journalist community, or the job-seeking chef community. The fact that you suddenly have larger numbers to sift through means that a community which might be hard to reach through other channels becomes economically viable because you have eliminated geographical groupings as a factor. Approached correctly they should still respond as customers, opening up audiences to which you would otherwise have been closed.

So you can perceive communities where the members may themselves be unaware of it. And there are ways of engineering a bit of community feeling around the place.

Selecting the Right Network

You need to start by selecting the networks in which your customers and prospects are already taking part. Many businesses have suffered by going onto Twitter when their clients aren’t there already, or onto Facebook in markets that have actively rejected that particular network.

You will need to find out which of the networks is right for your business by researching among your customers, as I established in my first book on the subject. Lots of companies audit their customers according to which media they read so that they can ascertain where to advertise; if you do this, ask them also where they get their social media and concentrate your fire wherever they congregate.

Various social media have different techniques to attract different communities and indeed to insulate uninterested people from stuff about which they’re unmoved. Twitter’s hashtags are a good, straightforward starting point.

Hashtags

You can actually force communities to happen – or set up the right conditions for them to occur naturally – on Twitter, still one of the fastest growing social networks you’ll find. If you happen to have read my first book on social media you’ll be aware that this started off as a series of announcements then really took off when it started to allow replies. It turned into a conversation.

The next step was when it turned into a series of conversations with the introduction of the hashtag, where you just put a hash sign – a ‘#’ – in front of the subject you want to talk about. To many people this seems a bit pointless when the idea is first introduced, but it’s not. The hashtag is a way of sorting through Tweets when you’re using a fairly generic term. Let’s say you’re looking for, or offering, employment. So you enter ‘#jobs’ as a search term into Twitter.

This search will yield a better result because it’ll only show Tweets from people who’ve used the same #jobs hashtag. You’ll still miss stuff, since not everyone will use that hashtag. For instance, you’ll miss a Tweet that says ‘Astrophysicist wanted, Tooting’ because it doesn’t have the word ‘jobs’ in it. But you’ll get a better result because you’ve used a hashtag that people are likely to use.

TV and media programmes are wise to hashtags. They’re displayed at the beginning so that people wanting to comment on, say, The Apprentice, UK or US version, will put the hashtag #apprentice into their Tweets so that someone can just follow those discussions whereas people wanting to discuss apprenticeships or find out about apprentices in general can exclude those Tweets from their system.

This helps enormously when looking for interest groups or communities. You’re a toy manufacturer with a new license to offer figures based on the latest rash of superhero movies? Great, say so on Twitter and use the #Thor, #Batman, #Greenlantern, or whichever hashtag applies.

There’s no central repository or decision-making body about what becomes a hashtag and what doesn’t. It’s all a bit random, they either take off or they don’t – your followers adopt them or not. But they’re a great start to finding when people have started to divide themselves into communities, which you can then target with relevant and non-intrusive advertising.

Other Networks

The other major networks don’t have the same ease of creation as something like a hashtag but you can use a similar principle to search Facebook for groups of people discussing things in your business area. Make sure you tick the box for ‘groups’ when you’re searching and then take part in any related discussions as your time allows.

LinkedIn also has groups and increasingly these are searchable and open. If someone still operates a closed group you’ll need to ask them first before joining. You can set up your own group as well, if you have enough people ready to join. Never underestimate the work that goes into keeping these groups populated and fresh.

Getting the ‘World Wide’ Out of the Web

Naturally not everybody wants to reach a world wide audience, but the world wide web – in spite of the name – is still useful to people wanting to reach only a narrow geographical community. People use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the rest as well as the many local networks around to find people and businesses in their vicinity. This needn’t be through particularly sophisticated means: often you’ll see a note from someone on Twitter saying ‘Can anyone recommend a good builder in Wigan,’ or better still, ‘Just had service from an excellent gardener in Brighton at a reasonable rate.’ Of course someone can pretend to be a client and big their own service up, but you can find a lot out about local businesses by using the social networks.

Businesses can harness these social network members as well, and get them to operate as a sort of big marketing force – offering referrals and recommendations and using your hashtag to allow others to pick up on the services and goods you’re offering.

One company that’s done nicely through making a local community and interest group out of like-minded people is The Valet in Addiscombe, near Croydon in the UK. In early 2011 it won the Best New Business award for the Croydon heat of the South London Business Awards and it was shortlisted for the overall award.

Initially you’d think this was an ordinary if a little upmarket barber’s shop. The signs are there – men sitting having their hair cut is a good clue but there are a few extras. There’s a spa room on the premises where the business offers Swedish massages along with Indian stone treatments, facials, and other stuff. By the till the customers can buy the sorts of cologne, shaving creams, and upmarket shaving tools for which they’d normally have to travel to Central London or – let’s be honest – to their Amazon account, where you can get most of it.

This seemed to be a business in which the clients would welcome the chance to feel part of some sort of membership (otherwise why not just get the retail stuff online), and owner/founder David Maseyk takes a multi-channel approach – this book’s focus is electronic marketing but in the real world it’s all about getting the right mix.

‘At present we run a loyalty scheme,’ he says. ‘It’s a membership thing, makes the client feel like they’re part of a club – we offer loyalty points [which exchange for discounts or service upgrades] against treatments and product purchases. Once the customer has reached a total of 100 points they’re entitled to redeem them for exchange.’ Customers bring their membership cards out every time they pay for something, which is an interesting psychological point as there’s really no need – the salon will have taken the name when it booked the appointment so adding the points is going to happen automatically. It’s part of that feeling of belonging to something.

Electronic marketing is also very important to the company. It has a YouTube channel where it demonstrates a relaxing barbershop shave among other things, a lively Facebook page where it announces offers, an e-newsletter which goes to as many customers as require it, and a Twitter account to keep in touch with customers as well. ‘It’s like I’ve got two projects, one is called The Valet Barber and the other is the Facebook, Twitter, and our business blog marketing side of it,’ says Maseyk.

He spends time with his outsourced marketing company on other elements of e-marketing:

• Google Adwords – This is a scheme in which Google offers sponsored click-throughs – a business pays a small amount every time a potential customer clicks through after searching for a particular term. Maseyk found paying per click didn’t result in a paying customer every time.
• Spending time on SEO – this has performed better. Wisely he asks customers how they found the company when they weren’t physically walking past, and a lot of them reply ‘Internet search.’ The Valet is careful to note what the customer was searching for and tweaks the website to attract more (when the interview took place the business had done well from people looking for ‘men’s facial Croydon’ for example, coming out ahead of many longer established competitors.)
• Using incoming links – this pushes a site up the search ranking so the company ensures that the Facebook page leads back to the website, the blog leads back to Facebook, and the Tweets lead to both so there’s a little continuum of electronic marketing. The website is ‘thevaletmalegrooming.com’ and having ‘male grooming’ as a keyword in the title has also helped SEO.

Maseyk is realistic about the commitment that running his customers as an electronic community of some sort actually involves, and confirms it’s not easy. He is well aware that a lively Facebook community will pay as customers return to it for advice and exchange ideas about, say, shaving products, and if he’s there to stoke the conversations it’ll do even better. ‘The problem is I’m overstretched already,’ he explains. ‘We’ve grown the business for two years, it’s pulling into profit and so you’re pulled in different directions. I could downgrade something else to make cuts in order to divert my attention to the social media side of things, but that wouldn’t do any justice as you market to draw new business, but you then need to provide the service you’re advertising to retain that business. I don’t want to compromise the current business model we have on the floor, so it’s a case of having to delegate the work properly amongst a committed team, but in a nut shell the social media side of things is a key element to keeping the business and our customers in tune.’

Funding and Managing

This is the conundrum facing most small business owners. Often it’s simply difficult to find the time to engage with the customer and prospective customer online. You might aim to thank people on Twitter every time they give your business a mention, but if you’re busy trying to build up new business, it just doesn’t always happen. Likewise with keeping the Facebook community running for your business.

This is a universal problem. I was speaking at an educational publisher’s event on social media in 2010 and one of the people attending explained that he didn’t have extra resources to conjure up. He couldn’t allocate people he didn’t have or hire someone extra when his budget was actually being cut, so was struggling to make social media work for him with the overstretched skeleton staff he actually had.

The answer is a very old-fashioned one – time management and focusing on what is achievable and what isn’t. You might want to draw yourself up a list of tasks: these would include your core business functions, admin, sales, marketing, liaising with professional advisors, all the things a business has to do. Then add the desirable things: exorting people to review your business on websites and how they might be persuaded to do this without falling foul of the Bribery Act or ASA. Then allocate time to each task, see how ‘overdrawn’ you actually are on the time available to you and start cutting out the inessential tasks. At the same time it would be useful to put a table together of how much your business gets out of individual tasks to see whether there are any unproductive areas you can cut to make time for the newer stuff.

Masyek admits to suffering from this overstretchedness but despite this, The Valet scores better than most High Street retail premises for social networking and online community building. Ask anyone who has to handle the back office of such a business and be there for customers and they’ll confirm that being social electronically as well is damned tough.

Peer Reviews

There are a number of areas on the Internet in which customers can post reviews of a service. If you encourage customers to go onto these and put a review in place, great – be aware, though, that the reviews will by definition be beyond your control. If someone thinks they’ve had a lousy haircut at The Valet they’ll say so, regardless of looking fine in everyone else’s eyes.

The more reviews you get, as a rule, the more credible they seem. The trick is not to worry too much about whether an individual review is good or bad and watch the trend and the numbers. If loads of people are reviewing you well, great – if one or two had a bad experience people are likely to believe the rest of the reviews.

The Valet scores dramatically in the local networking arena, and this is where a lot of smaller outlets can do extremely well. Maseyk has seen to it that customers can find (figures correct at the time of writing and they can only grow):

• Google Maps (54 reviews)
• Review Centre (44 reviews)
• Trusted Places by Yell (9 reviews)
• Whose View (6 reviews)
• TouchLocal.com (11 reviews)
• Facebook (28 reviews).

This peer review system gets a lot of customers motivated to visit premises designed for them and reviewed by like-minded people, presumably looking for the same sort of service as the reader. The reviews are highlighted on the website and this again makes for a critical mass – a sort of virtuous circle of positive reviews placed where customers are deciding where to buy.

Registering for the Local Sites

The question for many small businesses reading will be: how do Maseyk and businesses like his get onto these local networks in the first place? The easiest way to start is to do a search on your immediate competition and see where they’re being reviewed.

There’s a lot of chicken and egg going on here. Take the Whoseview.co.uk site for example. The Valet has six reviews on it partly because it has encouraged people to leave them there but also because they just felt like doing so. You can ‘claim’ a business on the site if someone has reviewed yours or you can add your business (both have costs attached). Anyone reading this who has a small business serving a local community – or a large business with branches doing the same – should have a look immediately and see if it’s already there so you can consider replying to negative reviews or better, thanking people for positive ones (although do have a look at the box on negative comments).

Review Centre operates differently; its finances are driven by advertising and there’s no charge for having your business set up on the site. Just ask them through their website and they’ll do it in 14 days, or ask a customer to write a review (they may be doing so already). Yell.com, likewise, with its Trusted Places, encourages people to upload reviews immediately they arrive on the site with no invitation to register to have your business examined.

Proactively Encouraging Your Community

This could all sound a bit scary because it’s completely beyond your control. You can ask people to leave a review but will they? Likewise will it be a review you wish they hadn’t written?

There are plenty of things you can do which can be kept within control. Most of the energy around your business is going to come from you, to be honest, rather than your customers, so the more noise you make about it the better. As Masyek said previously, the sense of participation is important. Customers at The Valet are encouraged to convert to some sort of active membership. There is the aforementioned redundant membership card. Members’ accounts are kept up to date and loyalty points awarded at the till – you don’t have to produce a card but customers like to do so.

There is also an e-newsletter which highlights not only individual staff members but also occasionally customers. If someone is doing something for charity it may get a mention or, as was the case at A Suit That Fits, the odd celebrity popping in will get a mention. More importantly, however, people are encouraged to write a review of the service on the sites mentioned above

E-Newsletter Contents

Source: www.thevaletmalegrooming.com used with permission of The Valet.

If you’re going to send out a newsletter then good – do it. But plan it first, and don’t just think about the first couple of issues. Consider the frequency – maybe ask some customers how often they’d like to hear from you (they’re unlikely to have much of an idea but you can mention the fact that you’ve asked when you come to the launch) – then try planning out your first three months’ content. It has to be easy to read, it has to be correctly spelled or people will think you’re amateurish, and above all there has to be something going on so you can fill it.

Then there’s the business planning. How long is this going to take in addition to your Facebooking, Tweeting, and other social networking, your cajoling of customers to write reviews and engaging in conversation with them electronically? Once you have that amount of time in your head or on paper there’s the small matter of how much your income has to go up before it’s worth doing and how long you’re prepared to wait while the revenue reaches that point.

You may not be after revenue as such. Let’s take the existing example of The Valet. David Maseyk sends out his newsletters periodically; he and his web master have got the hang of RSS feeds so people get sent the thing either to their news reader or by email. Would someone really want their hair cut or a shave more often than before because of a newsletter, though? The answer is almost certainly not. They might, though, feel more loyalty to The Valet than somewhere that didn’t keep them up to date and treat them as a part of something that was fun to take part in.

So set your target realistically.

Making It Seem Individual

Finally your business needs to look at its electronic and social media promotions, memberships or however you wish to look at them, as an adjunct to an existing business. Too many companies get carried away with every last small piece of marketing that comes their way; they can end up as career marketers rather than wine sellers, gardeners, photographers, or whatever they planned to become in the first place.

This is where David Maseyk, stretched though he may be, is getting it very right indeed. He can’t allocate the time both to running an excellent social media campaign or Facebook interactions as well as running the business without cutting corners; at the time of writing he hadn’t the resources to outsource the social media elements to anybody else so he took the decision that the service and its personalization came first. He doesn’t do as much Tweeting and Facebooking as he’d like because it would take him away from looking after his customers and suppliers and without an excellent service he might as well go home.

Electronic marketing can help in this personalization. Finding out what people are looking at and what they are ignoring on a newsletter tells you where your focus needs to be. Seeing where they go on your website after reading your newsletter can be instructive in telling you whether you’ve missed something, whether they’re more inclined to spend money. Good branding will help, and so will little touches like putting someone’s name on a newsletter rather than an impersonal ‘dear customer.’ But it should certainly tell you how to make the electronic experience of your business closer to the feeling of actually being there.

Community

This chapter started by talking about the sort of community your customers belong to. We went through a few possibilities of ethnicity, age, and sex, then we looked at the way they divide themselves into communities along the lines of interests without even thinking about it.

However if there’s one technique or idea I’d like you to take away from this chapter then it’s that they’re also in another community – the community of your customers. They join immediately they step through the door and they become a member of the community of your prospects when they start to look at your website. Turning these community members into active rather than passive ones, by engaging with them wherever possible and keeping in touch through e-newsletters and tracking what they do about these communications is a vital part of social commerce in the loosest sense.