How To Engage Customer Communities

Our special guests at #CMXBoston Breakfast on April 29 were Bonnie Porter Huggins, Gratitude Champion at Buffer, and Kara Hendrick, Digital Manager at Velcro Companies, two great companies with mature and defined brands and communities. For those who couldn’t make it, here are highlights from both their experiences and those of other amazing community pros in Boston.

Customers are people, and people crave connection

Any way you slice it, whether you’re thinking of customer value propositions as defined by Bill Lee, or the community curve as defined by Carrie Jones, community managers in all kinds of industries are often focused on humanizing companies and deepening relationships with customers. Without community, a customer’s relationship to a business is strictly transactional.

Successful community initiatives result in thriving spaces where customers — now community members — connect with peers to exchange resources, lessons learned, ideas, and tips. If you’re a company that believes in doing well (being commercially successful) by doing good (giving real value to customers), this is one way to accomplish that mission.

If you’re a company that believes in doing well (being commercially successful) by doing good (giving real value to customers), this is one way to accomplish that mission.

Drive customer engagement without the sales pitch

Buffer and Velcro’s customer engagement activities primarily take place on social media. They instigate and moderate community conversations that are not necessarily about their products, but about related topics that matter to their customers.

Kara explained that Velcro’s “hook and loop” product is used by both businesses and consumers, and that engagement strategies must be tailored to each audience. Velcro delivers the right content to different audiences through LinkedIn showcase pages. For engaging specific consumer communities, they host quarterly Twitter parties with relevant influencers, such as HGTV stars. Contests, such as raffles, are also executed via social media and are popular with Velcro’s consumer community.

At Buffer, Bonnie supports community initiatives such as their popular tweetchat, #bufferchat. Due to popular demand, #bufferchat now takes place twice a week. Their customer community also chats on their own, whenever they want, in dedicated community Slack channel. AMAs with community influencers also happen on Slack. Is delight a measurable community metric? That’s a bit tricky, but Buffer believes in delighting and acknowledging customers (and prospective customers) and has put Bonnie in charge of their entire swag distribution operation.

• Pro Tip from Amanda Tessier at Drift: Alyce.co is a service that helps you pick the perfect gift for your community members.
• Pro Tip from Margaret Kelsey at Invision: Boost engagement in tweetchats by adding the opportunity to win a surprise gift.

Tailor metrics to your company to focus results

Expand your reach, transform strangers into customers, or make more successful members — whatever is more important to your company. Each team should choose a metric that links success in the community to success for the company.

Amanda at Drift, a new customer success platform, says that they are focused on growth and that experimentation is the name of the game. Their key metrics often change, but one metric they’ve looked at recently was triggers that transform strangers into free users of their product. Sara Sigel, my co-organizer at CMX Boston, is working on similar activities at Quilt: engaging and nurturing prospective customers, and in the next phase, onboarding new customers.

Margaret at Invision, a prototyping and collaboration tool for designers, reported that Invision’s current goals are to position themselves as thought leaders on design topics and to expand the reach of their content. They do this by deliberately tackling controversial topics on their blog, and by inviting influencers to contribute. About 80% of their blog contributors are community influencers. A key engagement metric at Invision are blog views and shares.

At Workable, I recently launched an event series, #WorkableIdeas. Engagement metrics that I look at include: how many people sign up for events, how many people are repeat attendees, and how frequently the event hashtag is used on Twitter. Identifying power users and relevant experts and working with them to create useful and engaging content is also part of my role as a community builder.

Daniel Marotta works for Penn Foster Education, a distance education private high school.He reports that they’ve seen the big picture value of community engagement in their data. Students that are active in their community hubs pass more exams and finish faster than other students.

Got customer engagement questions? Tweet them to us with the tag #CMXBoston

Our discussion continues on our CMX Boston Slack channel. Want in? Tweet us at @CMXBOS and we’ll connect you.

What can community pros do to make it easy for members to engage? Gamification? Something else? How do you bring in and engage new members? Do you have an onboarding process that helps?