Curating brand communities in the age of conversational media

Communities cluster around an idea or a shared belief. The seed idea or belief in a brand community is rooted in the values espoused by the brand. While there is a well-defined art of creating and nurturing brands in a world dominated by static & dynamic media, we are left to the mercy of guesswork and throw caution to the winds when it comes to dealing with curating brand communities in the age of conversational media.

In the old world dominated by broadcast media, social community engagements could be carefully controlled (manipulated), to deliver an unified brand experience. There were visual branding and tonality guidelines accompanied by well documented do’s & don'ts, not to forget the rigorous training behind a brand team, that helped orchestrate the delivery of the desired message or experience. As broadcast media gave way to conversational media, there was far less control.

The Challenge

The challenge now is to unify the brand experience on different social media hubs, where the engagement styles of consumers are fundamentally different. Assume you manage the marketing of a popular apparel brand and you have mutually exclusive clusters of your brand fans on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Your challenge is that you cannot fall back on established methodologies of unifying the brand experience; the old school of unifying design will not work for you anymore. There is no point in taking a print advertisement, repurposing it as a facebook post and then sharing that link on twitter, to preserve visual identity. So how do you unify the experience (if at all) and is there a compelling need anymore? Do consumers care or would they rather engage in a manner that is frivolous with content that is ephemeral in nature? The answer will hopefully come in a series of future posts.

What are you designing for?

A community cluster starts growing organically when there is a sense of belonging. The journey starts by visually identifying a brand you are already in love with or liking the content you stumble upon. As new members join and participate in conversations and actions, demonstrating that a cluster has reached a critical mass, the community needs a curator. This is a person who is highly skilled in not just getting the pulse of the seed community but shaping and giving voice to the shared community vision. Community behavior on different new media platforms are vastly different.

Communities work exceedingly well when they are small in size, share a common belief and devoid of riff-raff. When communities grow large, it is a challenge to steer diverging opinions, tastes and conversations; if not curated with a religious zeal, they take a life of their own and are soon filled with trolls who damage the brand’s core, often alienating the passionate few who started the journey. Your first task is to define why you need fan communities and followers of your brand on social platforms. What will be the desirable size, ramp-up time horizons and what will be the metrics of community health?

If it is about building advocacy, by design you need to keep them ‘small’ in size, niche and exclusive, so you can curate the conversation keeping it highly relevant to the brand. If it is about building mass awareness, create highly shareable content that uses the network multiplier (aided by media) to reach relevant audiences. If it is about delivering a value proposition, intervene in the consumers search and discovery loop, surfacing with relevant branded content.

Takeaways

The art of engaging different audience sets and curating multiple communities on conversational media, while attempting to deliver an unified brand experience, continues to evolve. Think like a new-media publisher. Be bold to experiment, with different styles and voice of content. Own permission to market to, but try not to displace your audience from their comfort channels. But first, start with defining a framework.