Community the new buzz word!

The Power of a community

Creating a community is no easy task, it takes time, effort and consistency which is why those who are successful at it reap enormous rewards.

There are three main striking advantages to creating a solid community:


1. Those in the community will strive to see your business succeed and hence exert time and effort helping you and your business. Those are the type of people who continuously give constructive feedback, constantly sing the praise of your business to others and essentially act as ambassadors.
Members here will recruit others into the community.

2. Many businesses attempt to reinvent the wheel, here is an idea, why don't we take an idea that already exists and do it better than any other competitor? how? by seeking the advice and involvement of the community for product development. Organisations that are close to their customers have a higher success rate when introducing new products because the chances are that they are able to produce a product that exactly fulfils the customer's requirement. Too many businesses attempt to acquire new customers without talking to or listening the ones they already have, having to constantly commit resources to acquisition. It is at least a third cheaper to maintain a customer to acquire one.
The bucket theory suggests that you keep pouring new customers at the top while the existing ones keep escaping from the holes in the bucket, those holes can be closed by offering a good quality service and a product customers actually want.

3. In times of hardship or in times when the business requires support, the community is where that support is likely to come from. If the business wants to launch a new product and needs people to talk about it, it's the community that will spread the word.

Employees that can build communities for the business play a central role, it is often perpetuated that customers enjoy building a relationship with at least one employee as they enjoy the comfort of dealing with one person who understands their requirements. Hence encouraging customer facing employees in building solid relationships that pour directly into the larger community of the organisation is essential.

Google has been known to recruit for attitude and train for skill, nowhere does this hold more true than when recruiting those that are in customer facing roles and have the potential of expanding the community the organisation is likely to heavily rely on.

Building a community is a skill not to be underestimated and recruiters should prioritise it.