Provide relevant content.
The right content can light your community on fire and generate valuable contributions. Focus on topics or questions that your customers are already talking about. Take, for example, Whole Foods Market's social media initiatives, where customers can come together through forums to learn more about organic food and express their thoughts on a range of topics central to the Whole Foods community.
Further enhanced by blogs, video, and audio podcasts, social media is used by Whole Foods experts to alert customers to topical issues like the recent safety concern over peanut butter, as well as share the inside scoop on new products coming to market. Passionate customers are now eagerly contributing their opinions and interacting directly with Whole Foods via its unique combination of online social experiences.
Drive community back to you.
It's critical to go where your customers live, and many of your best customers are clearly living on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. But it's equally important to direct consumers back to where your brand lives. Why? Because consumers today are incredibly sophisticated. They expect to be able to talk back to you online, and they're demanding richer, deeper interaction capabilities with your brand.
Dunkin' Donuts has found a good balance between leveraging open space on the internet and its own core digital asset, www.dunkindonuts.com. Dunkin' Dave, the company's designated representative on Twitter, interacts with people in a casual manner and still manages to be witty and on-topic about donuts. What's more, he often directs consumers back to Dunkin' Donuts, both offline and online, in an unobtrusive manner. For instance, on President Obama's Inauguration Day, he sent out a tweet informing customers in South Florida of free red, white, or blue frosted donuts at their local store.
Leverage social syndication.
The next frontier for socially enabling your brand is allowing the many interactions that happen on your site to travel to wherever they are most relevant. Just as some large news organizations syndicate their content to thousands of smaller outlets, you can shape and extend your brand by allowing consumers to effortlessly pluck information from your website and carry it with them wherever they go.
As an example, if visitors post comments, review products, or ask questions on your site, enable them to cross-post those interactions wherever they want, thus enabling their friends and family to see and participate in the conversation. In other words, the content no longer resides on your site alone, but in other important places where your consumers live online.
Another example is eHow. In addition to leveraging social media throughout the site, eHow gives its community the ability to cross post their contributions (articles, comments, etc) directly to their Facebook profile as well as Twitter. This approach effectively broadcasts social interactions that originate on a site to other interesting and relative places around the social web.
By adding social media features and experiences to their digital destinations, brands of all shapes and sizes can quickly build a sense of community and humanity. These qualities are critical -- surveys repeatedly show that consumers are more likely to trust each other than they are to trust marketers. Inviting customers to take part and engage with a broader community not only provides a rich content experience, it fosters long-term trust and loyalty. In an increasingly connected online world, it's these interactions that drive all-important purchase behavior and brand loyalty.
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Adam Weinroth is director of product marketing for Pluck.
