How To Harness Influencers: 3 Best Practices For Tapping Into The Power Of Communities
By Andrew Z. Brown, Bridgemaker Referral Programs
Throughout this ‘Centers of Influence’ series, we’ve addressed challenges at the very root of all types of programs used to harness the energies, skills and passions of influencers important to your business. Whether you rely on re-sellers, alliance partners, employees or customer advocates, we’ve outlined how to recruit influencers, how to build trusted relationships and how to structure influencer programs.
You should know that there comes a time in the life of every successful influencer program when the foundations you’ve put into place allow you to reap the benefits of process automation. That’s right, your influencers can act ‘automatically’ in the best interest of your business without the need for extensive supervision. But, to do so requires more than rolling out a technology platform and a reward schedule for influencers. One proven way to effectively ‘automate’ influencers is by creating a trusted and vibrant community where influencers share something in common that is important to all of them.
So, to help you scale your influencer program, we turn our attention to how you can build a strong self-sustaining community that helps you achieve your growth goals. To do so, we outline best practices and draw on the experiences from those who have successfully built online (and/or offline) communities.
Those with community-building experience who share their insights include:
- Michael Fisher – Also known as ‘MrMobile’, Michael and his team have built an online community of over 840,000 mobile technology enthusiasts. Unlike many other technology/gadget-focused online communities, the MrMobile community is not built on ‘paid reviews’ or fees from product manufacturers/re-sellers.
- Debbie McGrath – Founder and Chief Instigator at HR.com. Over the span of 20 years, Debbie has built HR.com to be a thriving online (and offline) community of close to 2 million Human Resources professionals.
- Jessica Rhodes – Founder of Interview Connections which is a podcast booking agency that has just recently launched its first community – starting on Facebook.
Best Practice #1: Choose The Type Of Community You Need
Harnessing influencers by building a community means first deciding the type of community you want – or put, another way, what business goals you want to achieve.
For instance, having launched a growing software business, chances are you’ve had some experience supporting one type of community – a product insights community. This is your ‘user group’ which provides low-risk and low-cost market feedback. Comprised of existing customers, partners and/or employees, this type of community ensures your product evolves in ways that keep you in line with the market and ahead of competitors.
If, over time, your product has increased in complexity, you may have tried your hand at launching a product support community. Consisting of customers – long-standing and newbies alike – this type of community enables its members to share experiences about your products in a structured and efficient way. The greatest benefit to your business is reduced customer support costs. This type of community serves as a hotbed of ideas that can strengthen your product roadmap. At the same time, product support communities often surface insights about competitors and their offerings.
The widespread adoption of several social media platforms has enabled companies to use publicly available tools to construct a socially-driven community. These types of communities consist of a broad range of people who can be leveraged for broadcasting information about your products and building general brand awareness.
There remains another type of community which has proven to be cost-effective for business development: an advocate community. Comprised of a careful blend of customers, prospective customers, employees, partners and media – all of whom feel various degrees of kinship to you, your brand and/or your products – an advocate community can be a true revenue-generating army.
In addition to choosing the type of community you want to build (or leverage), make sure you translate your specific goals into measurable outcomes that can be measured and attributable to your community. For example, Jessica Rhodes’ is looking to eventually convert 2 to 5 percent of community members into clients.
Best Practice #2: Actively Manage The Community
For any type community to thrive means having a clear understanding of the reasons why members choose to join and participate. While those reasons may evolve over time, every successful community has some sort of ‘emotional glue’ that keeps members connected despite all the other demands on their lives.
For example, Debbie McGrath, the heart and soul of the Human Resource’s profession’s best-in-class community, oversees 100 dedicated staff to ensure that the HR.com meets its mandate of helping HR practitioners advance their professional careers. In contrast, the community being built by Interview Connections is bound together with a common passion for sharing product/service innovations.
Once you have identified what binds your community together, your role is to help members feel like they can continue to tap into whatever that ‘glue’ is. Actively managing the community also means taking the following steps:
- Set clear ‘boundaries’ about what content and behaviors is, and is not, acceptable within the community.
- Moderate member activity to ensure your community guidelines are truly lived within the community.
- Serve as a ‘facilitator’– sparking conversations and encouraging members to communicate productively with one another within the community – while demonstrating that you’ve created a ‘safe’ environment in which they can share ideas and feelings.
- Set a distinctive identity for your community. That includes choosing a compelling/relevant name, using community-relevant terminology, symbols and rituals. Furthermore, celebrate key community milestones and important contributions.
While he has become recognized in the mobile technology sector as the leader of a successful online community, Michael Fisher, aka MrMobile, still spends time monitoring initial comments posted shortly after taking YouTube videos live. The reason according to Fisher: “Initial comments have a powerful momentum and can snow-ball quickly.’ In fact, he has found that by downplaying any initial trash-talking comments, he can effectively set the tone for more positive comments to follow. These in turn take on a life of their own with community members continuing their discussions on more conversation-friendly platforms, including Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.
Keep in mind that communities evolve through the same stages that all groups go through (i.e. ‘forming, storming, norming and performing’). As a result, welcoming and orienting new members to your community is critical. At a minimum, you should:
- Acknowledge new members
- Reinforce what is expected of community members
- Gather information about why they’ve joined your community, why they’ve joined now and how they think they can best contribute to the community
Best Practice #3: Strive To Get To Know Your Community Members Better
While your community is a unifying force – pulling people together who share something in common – you need to keep in mind that its members are not uniform. So, as your community grows, spend time understanding the different ways members engage with, use, and extract value from, the community. To that end, start by creating ‘buckets’ (i.e. segments) of your members. For example, use a simple framework for understanding online community behaviours developed by Harvard’s Charlene Li which suggests six distinct groups based on observable behaviors, including:
- Creators who lead the charge in contributing content to your community;
- Critics whose contributions to your community are limited to providing opinions;
- Collectors who organize content;
- Joiners who are prepared to identify themselves as being members of your community but take no further action;
- Spectators who just consume the content developed and shared in your community; and
- Inactives who have ‘checked out’ but do not go through the steps of removing themselves from your community.
Once you’ve segmented your community you can focus your energies on those groups that will help you achieve your community-specific goals in support of your business goals. As your community evolves, continue gathering more details about member expectations and behaviours – in terms of them supporting the vibrancy and focus of your community.
According to HR.com’s McGrath, “We’re constantly building on our understanding of community members because it ensures we serve them well. It also has helped us to recognize that some members are far stronger advocates than others. Such knowledge allows us to better engage with this key segment and in turn better serve the rest of our community and achieve our business goals.”
Other Key Lessons About Successful Communities And Community-Building
Our community-building experts had a slew of other practical insights, including these essential tips (which have been paraphrased):
“Consider the role of a strong personality when creating an online community…If people see someone as having integrity and being authentic that can help generate trust – which is important in building communities.” – Michael Fisher, MrMobile
“Make sure your technology is rock solid. Early on, we had our community hacked. One of the ways we guard against this from happening in the future is by insisting people enrol in our community (for free) to participate.” – Debbie McGrath, HR.com
“Identify how you’re going to generate revenue from your community – if that is one of your objectives. Keep in mind that advertisers will not automatically flock to your community.” – Debbie McGrath, HR.com
Communities And Community-Building: Harsh Truths
Finally, be aware of deceptively appealing myths about community-building. To keep you from falling prey to them, consider these ‘harsh truths’:
- A target audience that you want to sell to does not, in and of itself, constituent a viable community.
- Implementing a user-friendly community-building software is neither sufficient for your community to succeed nor is it a pre-requisite to launching one.
By applying the best practices described above, you will be better equipped to build and grow a thriving community in which your influencers will happily participate – an influencer community that will forward your business goals.
Communities referenced above:
Interview Connections (on Facebook)
About The Author
Andrew Z. Brown is Founder and Chief Innovation officer of Bridgemaker Referral Programs. He is the lead author of the How to Grow Your Business Through Better Relationships series – which includes books on optimizing growth by leveraging referral sources, channel partners and strategic alliances.