building

Creating Expert Communities with Tweetchats

In June #MMchat aka #MarketerMonday chat will be held for the 100th time!

Established July 26th, 2010 #MMchat has become a weekly tradition for an ever expanding number of CMOs, marketers and others working in and around the digital social networking space. And all of us at @TheSocialCMO were recently very pleased when #MMchat was named one of the 15 Essential Social Marketing Twitter Chats by Mashable.

One of the most elusive goals of transient social networks remains the creation of sustainable ongoing communities of interest. Tweetchats are an excellent way to not only establish such an expert community, but to also keep it engaged and growing on an ongoing basis.

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If You Build It, The Leads Will Come

It’s quickly becoming the mantra of interactive strategists: lead or be led. You either lead your online community, or they will lead you. There’s no stopping the swell of communal opinion generation that has become the hallmark of our society’s online engagement.

The most die-hard critics of social media are beginning to utter: If you cant beat them, join them. But is simply joining the online community enough for a business to discover the elusive Return on Investment from social media activities? Many practitioners call this the catch 22 of the medium: overtly selling in social networks is counter-community and quickly kills your following; not selling is counter-intuitive to most business culture.

So if selling is counter-intuitive to community-building where do the leads come from? My philosophy has always been to let the leads find me! Its quite ingenious if I do say so myself! Why sell when, if done right, social media will have people lining up to ask for my service? Sound good? It is, but its not easy to achieve.

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Measure What Matters

More than once in recent weeks I’ve participated in (or overheard out of the corner-of-an-ear) discussions on how time-consuming social media has become, what the payoff might be, and when it might be realized. And I would certainly be surprised if many of you haven’t asked some version of these same questions of yourself or others.

Not only is the issue real; it is legitimate.  It isn’t as though any of us has either a shortage of work, or an overabundance of free time on our hands.

Why are we here?  What keeps pulling us back?  When will the investment pay off?  And will we recognize the payoff when it occurs?

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Beyond Connections, to Building Relationships

It is news to no one that when it comes to marketing, relationships trump everything.

A challenge in the pursuit of this asset is to recognize the difference between connections and relationships. (Or, for that matter, the difference between followers or fans and relationships.)

At the risk of oversimplifying, establishing connections is relatively easy. Building and nurturing relationships is not.

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