Build and Support a Community of Evangelists

“Bad behavior in the blogosphere”
That’s the headline from yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle referencing the recent threats against Kathy Sierra, a popular blogger (Creating Passionate Users) and author who stresses the importance of web design. I’m not going to make news of her terrible experience as, rather than an article worth repeating, it was that headline that caught my attention towards Kathy’s work giving me a chance to go in a different direction than my usual post. I want to share with you her blog, wisdom, and experience as her insight is worth your attention.

I’ve had the chance to read some of her work and in her recent post, “User Community and ROI” I found myself chuckling as I am faced with a similar question she hears all the time, “someone always asks, “That’s all good and nice that helping users learn is the key to creating passionate users… but who’s going to do all that extra work? Who’s going to make the extra tutorials and better docs?” Who hasn’t heard a variation of that question and faced the challenges of 1: Funding or 2: Resources??

Her solution? Rely on your audience, support your customers, and help them create a community to evangelize your brand/store/website. She includes a host of marketing suggestions including discussion forums, paid participation, customer conferences, and education none of which really hit home for our challenges in online marketing; however, the message is the same, interact with your customer if you expect them to interact with you, support your fans if you expect them to promote you. When thinking about channels closer to home (i.e. social bookmarking, link building, blogging, or simple adoption of RSS) that message rings true and reminds me that I can’t build an audience for this blog without writing something of value to you. Creating a community is a great way to foster good will for your company but you will fail to do that without providing value.