Community Building

Community building involves managing how you build your reputation and brand via the social networks. Social networks are not traditional networks, so traditional networking techniques are not really going to work here. People on the Internet react differently. For one thing, traditional advertising (such as “Our product is great, please buy it!”) generally doesn’t fly with the Internet audience. Many big companies do not do very well with Internet marketing, and that’s because they’re using the same types of traditional marketing messages that work in print and TV advertising. On the whole, Internet users are turned off by traditional marketing methods.

So what do you do in this situation? The solution is to give away control. That’s right: There is only so much you can do for your brand, and, at a certain point, you must allow it to work for itself. When you’re engaging others in a conversation on the Internet about your brand, you cannot control the conversation. You can only be a participant in it.