Conversation is King!

Human beings are communal and conversational by nature. If you ask a group of people about their interests and how they spend their free time, regardless of how they choose to spend it, it is highly likely they will talk passionately, and it will entail hanging out and conversing with friends and family. So, it isn't surprising that we’ve seen digital communities flourish in the last ten years. As a result of this, more and more brands are dedicating their campaigns to offering a ‘value exchange’ in order to draw consumers online to help build their brand communities. And the best way to do this? Allowing the consumer to contribute, interact, react, and influence the way a brand behaves. As Canadian blogger Cory Doctorow aptly says, ‘Content isn’t King. Conversation is King. Content is something to talk about.’

Online communities encourage and promote trust, mainly because we’re likely to value and believe the opinions of our peers over those offered through traditional advertising methods. Trust is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve for brands, which strive for greater transparency in their actions and communications. Websites like Trip Advisor, which is based on real-life experiences and opinions, have flourished mainly because there are active communities of ‘honest’ consumers willing to contribute, influence and share knowledge.

Perhaps more staggering is how Starbucks has prospered through brand communities. In 2008, it was facing huge pressures as sales slumped and the brand had to do something to turn around its fortunes. It took a number of steps, including creating the new branded communities, and a year later it reported 4% growth and a 200% rise in profits - a significant turnaround.

The key to any brand community is real-time communications, which require brands to listen, learn and respond to consumers, yet the challenge for brands is how they are geared up to deal with this. We’re currently helping to develop a community for Captain Morgan’s Spiced, which launched in the UK earlier this year. To ensure rapid response, we have a dedicated Communities Manager working on the project. In order to help promote the brand, we have used social media channels to take a lead role in the communications plan through a Facebook page takeover. Using Facebook, we are currently engaging the community in dialogue, running competitions and outbound eComms, driving page traffic, amplifying offline events through digital amplification as well as running Facebook ad campaigns and leading local implementation of global campaigns. Since the transition to Captain Morgan’s Spiced, the Facebook community has grown from 16,000 to over 62,000 (as of November 2011).

Brand communities are based on honesty and transparency, yet how can consumers really trust the content they’re seeing? More recently the provision of content by brands has been under investigation. The two industry trade bodies, the IAB and the ISBA, are working in conjunction with the ASA to put some guidelines in place for the ways in which brands are engaging with social media, including Twitter, Facebook and blogs. The process is being spearheaded by a consultant at We Are Social, who is helping to put together these rules and regulations. The rules set by both associations are basic and include such things as having to disclose when video content is posted on behalf of a brand onto a blog, for example. The brand will need to be completely transparent with its consumers.

The reason behind this is that more and more marketers are seeing the value in producing content to feed their communities, but the means by which this content is produced and distributed is a grey area. This year, the industry has started to uncover the fact that some brands are using questionable methods to build this content; for example, paying people to Tweet or provide editorial content. The issue with this ‘false content’ is that it clearly infects what should be a genuine experience for consumers and compromises the integrity of the brand’s whole community.

Despite this, I believe it is truly an exciting time for online communities. Brands are finally beginning to open their eyes to see social media as a long-term engagement channel rather than something that can be turned on and off, and as a result, we are likely to see more creative and varied approaches to online communities developing. We are also likely to see an increasing number of marketers demanding clear objectives and measurement for their campaigns. Online communities and social media are no longer the new kids on the block. So, just as you wouldn’t dream of creating above the line marketing campaigns without adequate measurement, social media will be subjected to the same rigor.