Building a Business Takes a Village

I never thought I would utter these words but Hillary Clinton was right, it does take a village, but not only when raising kids.  In order to build a successful business you need to create and nurture a community, and very often several communities at once.  With the wealth of web portals, social networks and software applications at your disposal, establishing these relationships has never been so easy, yet at the same time it has also never been so difficult.  Having worked with multiple clients over the years building websites to support their efforts, I have some thoughts on strategies you need to consider when building your village:

Define your Communities
This could be potential clients, current clients, trade partners, distributors, salespeople, investors, etc.  Create as deep a profile as you can, utilizing existing data from your CRM or from research and analytics that is available to you.  You could also interview existing contacts within each community to get a more in-depth understanding of where they currently engage online.

Understand the best forum(s) to engage each community.
The options are almost endless, but most certainly your resources are not, so narrow your focus to get the best bang for your buck.  inevitably each audience that you are trying to reach is already online, and part of an existing community such as:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Associations
• Forums

You could also decide to build your own community, drawing these important audiences into your own environment.  The argument is that you now have more control over the content, direction, and value provided by the community and increase your opportunities to see a return for your involvement.  You have to weigh this return versus the level of effort and cost to create and nurture the community from the ground-up.  We have worked with multiple consulting companies that have shown this approach can pay off, www.wikibon.org, www.drugsafetycouncil.org and www.raintoday.com are all successful communities that support the thought leadership efforts of consultants who manage the community.  They were built to engage a specific audience and have proven successful based on assigning the appropriate resources to growing and nurturing the site and providing outstanding value to the members. 

Determine how you measure a successful community
Like any other strategy you implement you should determine how to measure the success of your community efforts.  For some companies this could mean leads generated, or for a project like the portal we are building to support IKON's relationship with the 4500 UPS stores in the US, it might be measured by increased store sales, or decreased support calls. 

Here's a great post from the Community Roundtable Blog that discusses measurement - Measure, But Measure Wisely - As the author, Rachel Happe, states, "From my experience, metrics are essential to understanding if where you are spending your time is working well or not."  Rachel is one of the founders of the Community Roundtable and if you are in charge of building or managing a community for your organization the Community Roundtable is an excellent resource.

Constantly analyze and modify
If you are going to build a successful business you need to constantly analyze feedback and make adjustments to your plan and building a community is no different.  Always be looking for ways you can be more effective.  If you are actively engaged then some changes will be obvious, if you are measuring then other changes will become clear in the data.

We have decided to engage our community in our blog, Twitter and LinkedIn, but to date have neglected Facebook.  This could change as we continue to listen to and analyze our audiences to understand where we can have the most effective conversation.

As I was writing this post, another timely article popped up from Geni Deitrich of Arment Deitrich. Gini describes the Secret Sauce that goes into building and online community "what it is that creates such a strong sense of community and why they want to continue giving"  Check it out - The Online Community Secret Sauce