Platforms like Facebook Groups or Google Groups, on the other hand, are designed to facilitate many-to-many interactions, encouraging people to engage with posts from others and share their own content. A great example of this type of community is Starbucks’ Leaf Rakers Society—a community that celebrates fall, and the iconic Pumpkin Spice Latte, all year round.
WhatsApp or Slack can also work, but they become challenging when the communities grow to be too large: Comments get easily lost and conversations can be hard to follow. Some brands choose to take their community in-house by creating their own forums within apps or websites, but this requires an expectation for new behavior of users beyond platforms they’re already interacting with, going against the grain rather than capitalizing on natural user behaviors.
It’s a lot easier to leverage platforms people already use on a daily basis. But one great exception is LEGO Ideas, which enables fans to become LEGO Fan Designers, submitting ideas via its own platform. Ideas that garner the most community interest can be brought to life, produced and sold.
There’s no one place to establish a community, but you should consider things like your customer demographic, the size of your community now and in the future, and where you’re already seeing the most chatter about your brand. Our community operates in various Facebook Groups where members create and share a huge volume of organic content, and it’s in these posts we see the magic happen: People are sharing personal stories, supporting and encouraging each other with tips, advice and compliments. They promote our products (better than we ever could!) but they also ask questions and share honest answers, even in instances where they haven’t had the best experience. We encourage this honesty because it creates credibility—people know they can trust what they’re reading.
Invest in moments that are hard to scale
Not everything you do to build your brand has to be scalable. There are opportunities everywhere to create moments that make people feel heard and special. This could be a small act—responding to every comment they take the time to share, even just with a short note, showing people that you acknowledge and care about their engagement—or something bigger: inviting a number of people to be guests at your next product launch, or offering the chance to contribute ideas for a new product.
These are moments that are hard to scale, but they say a lot about your brand and create shared experiences that take the customer relationship beyond just a buy-sell transaction. Think outside the box and keep in mind that these small moments create experiences, and experiences are what create loyalty. And we’ve found this is something that motivates not only our customers but our employees as well.
Often, the brand activities that are hardest to measure with traditional marketing metrics are the ones with the greatest long-term impact.