Community is a big, daunting concept tossed around everywhere these days, including on this blog. To succeed in today’s business and to make it sustainable, you must build community, in a wider sense and around your brand. But how do you build community from scratch? How do you engage in existing communities where your target audiences congregate?
The good news: you can forget about community for now. Start with micro-communities.
In his essay on marketing to “the new ultra niches”, in Connect! Marketing in the Social Media Era, Jeff Caswell implicitly refutes the need to build community. I define community as “a cohesive social group or entity of human individuals possessing a unity of will and sharing interests, intents, beliefs, resources, preferences, and needs, within the larger society.” By contrast, ultra niches are small groups of people united by a single interest. Jeff uses the example of Bacon Salt, whose founders found through search and engaged on social networks people who publicly professed their love for bacon.
Similarly, though for different purposes, Mark Penn identified 75 microtrends passing through the cultural pipelines; ultra niches are hidden among those microtrends.
Jeff takes the concept of a customer persona to its post-modern extreme. You don’t need to develop a narrative-rich customer profile and then create a community out of people fitting it. Instead, identify the one interest or need your product address, find people with the interest or need, and engage with them.
Ultra niches are micro-communities. They already exist. People like to engage with people who are like them, or who like the same things they do, even if it’s just a small part of their identity. The narrower and more obscure the interest, the tighter and more passionate the micro-community.
Particularly if you’re a small or resource-strapped business, technology now enables discovering your target audiences with unprecedented precision. Search is your friend.
Ning, the site where you can create your own social network, now hosts more than one million social networks, including Portland Neighborhoods Net. Facebook or LinkedIn members interact in groups based on any particular interest; I’m a member of a number of sustainability and marketing related groups like GreenBiz and LOHAS. Flickr groups aggregate images by topics; though “Women on cold winter weather hood up” (thanks @caseorganic for the pointer) or “Stick figures in peril” may not be useful for your business, there are thousands of other groups and micro-groups.
Existing communities like these make building brand communities from scratch unnecessary. Some rules of community management apply to your engagement, but for the most part if you’re joining existing micro-communities, you should abide by their informal rules and be a valuable member. First and foremost, marketing to an online community requires not marketing.
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Image credit: KayVee.INC
