What Have You Done For Your Community Lately?
If I could sum up the advice I gather from books and seminars about networking and building business relationships, whether it takes place on a social media site like “LinkedIn” or a face-to-face meeting, it would be this: “Ask not what your network can do for you, ask what you can do for your network.”
Now take that sentence and substitute the word “online community” for “network”. It still works. The members of a community are connecting to help each other professionally in some way. And they are certainly helping the sponsor of the community drive a business objective. Part of managing a community, just as in managing a network, is focusing on furthering the interests of the people you’re interacting with, rather on focusing solely on how they can help you.
I was reminded of this philosophy when I read “Seven Steps to Creating a B2B Community on Twitter.” The article relays best practices for creating a relationship with your followers that is more about giving than taking to help build a thriving community.
What examples do you have of ways you have created a win-win situation for your community members?
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This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Community Moderation. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
“Furthering the interests of the people you’re interacting with” is exactly what good online communities can do. There really is a bit of a rush when you find someone online who needs information that you have already acquired, and you can jump in and help them.(We all secretly want to be heroes.) It happens online all the time, it gives community members incentive to “show-off” what they know by responding to someone in the community. It gives businesses an effective way to communicate and build relationships.