Community Building...
Had a chat the other day with one of Microsoft's leading (if not, the leading) community builder/marketer, Sean O'Driscoll. He's Microsoft's General Manager for Community Support & MVP
His blog, Community Therapy, talks about the ideas and challenges of building, managing, and growing a community. It's very much worthy of a read.
As we move into a post-traditional marketing era, knowing how to do this...no matter what scale we're talking about...is going to be critical for every organization.
Seth Godin talked about this when we were out at his U of Maryland presentation...the idea of flipping the funnel and giving your customers the megaphone. Which you can do, if you have successfully created an idea sharing community.
Our Event Best Practices call is a good example, I think, of community building. Every 2 weeks, we come together virtually, share ideas about what works and doesn't work, listen and learn from each other, go out and test, and then come back for more.
What I liked about my chat with Sean was:
- he doesn't pretend to have all of the answers
- we see eye to eye on many things, for example, we both thought Made to Stick was the book of the year for us (my review, his review)
- he understands the nature of the challenge
- he's not afraid to try new things in this new field