How to Create Engaging Communities?- Kathleen Booth

Particularly the sales team that the community is not a place to pitch. It's not that you can't mention the company, but you shouldn't be in there promoting doing a ton of promotion. I call it influence marketing, not influencer like influencer marketing is a thing. Influence marketing is is looking at how you create brand recognition and affinity amongst a broader set of people and organizations and channels that have the power to influence your buyer. The in the the people who are doing the influence in this case may not be influencers, they may just be another person in pavilion when the question gets asked, but they're a peer to your buyer and so they have influence with that one person. It's a very different way of thinking about it and that's why I don't like to call it influencer marketing because these are people that don't have big audiences, but they do have the ability to sway your buyer.

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Right now, if they're, if the objective is new customer acquisition, I would create a community that is not about the company or the product. So I wouldn't name the community after the company I, you know, or the product. I would keep it as a separate brand and I would have a person whose job it is to kind of own that community and be like, let's call it the host, quote unquote, or the mc. On my team when I was at Impact, I had a person like this. Her title was Director of Audience Engagement and Community. And her job was to just create a great experience for the people that were in our orbit. So I would, I would have a person who owned that and they're there. They would be gold around creating a fantastic experience in the community. And to do that means making sure that there's activity that people are posting, that if somebody asks a question, they get an answer. And so a good community manager does things like repost questions that nobody's responded to. It's organizing events for the community, whether those be AMAs or another type of roundtable, et cetera. You need to start small. Meaning, like, there can be a temptation to create a slack community or discord community or whatever it is. And like have tons of channels. But don't do that. Start small, have one channel and get conversation going in that one channel. And then when there's so much conversation about a topic that it warrants its own channel, split it off. But you want to have activity and you want people to feel like there's connections happening there. And so again, a good community manager will do things like welcome new members and encourage them to post about themselves and introduce themselves. And so having that person who really owns that and is gold around it is very, very important. And then also setting expectations with the, of the company and particularly the sales team that the community is not a place to pitch. It's not that you can't mention the company, but you shouldn't be in there promoting, doing a ton of promotion. The way, the way to get sort of get around that is you could have a channel called. A lot of communities have a channel called like Shameless Plugs.

Shameless Plugs, right.

And then you let anybody shamelessly promote themselves there. And you need to be prepared that perhaps one of your competitors might do it, you know, And I think you need to sort of set expectations for what you are and aren't going to allow, and you need to enforce them. But your own team needs to be prepared to follow through. And the most important thing is what you cannot have is somebody joins your community who's a good prospect for the company, and then the next day they get a call from the sales team, because that's the fastest way to get people to stop joining the community there. You need to figure out like, it's like what is a cql, a community qualified lead, right? What, what actions does somebody need to take in that community to either indicate that they might be ready and willing to have a conversation with sales, or is there some way that you can translate their involvement in the community into some engagement with your brand outside of it? Be that an invitation to a smaller event where your sales team is present and can have that conversation or, you know, some kind of an offer that you share that gets them more engaged with your brand that that handoff needs to be managed very, very careful.