Community Management + Brand Love

In a recent podcast episode, Ingram Digital Consulting spoke with community builder and strategist Christina Garnett about spreading the love across #MarketingTwitter, how to build brand love in your own communities, and what brands have 'killed it' or 'failed it' at community management. Here's a quick snippet:

How have you seen brands fail at creating community management?

When they try to do it quickly. Community is a slow game. It's a slow burn. So if you are just creating a Slack channel or you're just creating a website or you're just creating something and you're just like, "Boom, here it is. Go. Of course you want to join this." That's not enough. Now for some, oh, great, that sounds awesome. But that's going to be low-hanging fruit. You're not going to be able to build anything more just from that. You're doing relationship marketing on a large scale. How do you invite people and make each person feel welcome and valuable on a scale that can grow into the tens of thousands and bigger? You're literally planting seeds with every interaction, whether you're white-gloving people over by doing more than just an email, you're like personally reaching out to them to say, "Hey, we have this new community, we know how much you talk about such and such here. We would love for you to do that with us over here," all the way up to an email campaign or strategies for helping migrate from previous communities to one central one. You have to be able to communicate value. It is not going to come from nothing. There has to be an understanding of if I join, this is what I get ... We all have individual needs all over the place, but you need to be able to, if you're building a community, you need to be able to understand those. And just saying, "Here's a community," that's not enough. Brands need to really understand. It's going to take time. It's a slow burn. The people who are using it as a buzzword, we hope you understand how much time it takes. I hope you understand the work. It takes time.

Inspired and want to hear more? Find the full podcast here.