A few weeks ago, Forrester released a report on the “Connected Agency”, articulating the industry’s slow shift from message-focused marketing towards connection or community-based marketing that focuses on facilitating conversations between brands and ever-narrowing target audiences, or networks of niche communities.

The report includes a timeline from 2008-2013 predicting how the new agency model will unfold, but I’d argue that many digital agencies are already in the driver’s seat and are forging ahead with the connection model. In fact, Obama is already there, and it took less than a year.

How It’s Playing Out: 5 Things to Consider

Without getting into project specifics, what follows is a basic outline of the things I’ve considered useful when planning and executing on a community-based social media strategy.

• Establish Your Goals. Carefully define how you plan to engage community participants. Think about the type of content you want community members to create, and the conversations you want to foster. For example, do you want to structure your community around user-generated content, or facilitated discussions to mine for consumer insights? When thinking about your objectives, recognize that successful communities grow and change over time, so ensure some flexibility is built into your plan and carefully communicated to stakeholders.

• Define (and Find) Your Audience. Although general audience targeting is still helpful, it needs to be augmented with a bottom-up approach. Start by identifying similar topical or unofficial brand communities and learn to recognize their influential members. For a recent sports-related campaign, we focused on three groups of influentials: fan communities of our sponsored athletes and local athletic associations within their hometowns, amateur sports themed online communities, especially those for high school and college students, and finally, mainstream sports related blogs and news sites. By launching the campaign with the backing of our most enthusiastic supporters, we can ensure quality content submissions and enthusiastic discussions from the start.

• Create Value, Not Noise. People use social platforms for communicating and fostering social connections, not to listen to advertising. A 2007 study conducted by MySpace and Marketing Evolution reported that 70% of marketing value from social networking sites is derived from the “momentum effect” created when consumers co-create and pass-along branded campaign elements (applications, badges, etc.), rather than the reach and frequency of messaging.

• Seed and Facilitate The Conversation. One of the hardest aspects of starting an online campaign/community is attracting new members and motivating them to participate in an ongoing basis. Spend some time getting to the key influencers in related online communities and develop a personalized messaging strategy for informing them about your campaign. An “influencer toolkit” of sorts. Also consider inviting early joiners to be part of an online street team or expert’s panel and regularly solicit their input to shape future campaign endeavors. Another consideration: every successful community has at its heart a committed and diligent community manager responsible for creating editorial content, evangelizing the campaign or brand, soliciting content contributions, and identifying new community needs. Furthermore, make sure you have a communications plan in place that speaks to how you plan to engage regular contributors and visitors to your group. Identify content, features, and downloads that will keep members coming back, and have a plan to solicit the feedback of your community when creating new content.

• Coordinate the overall experience. And finally,with so many moving parts, it’s easy to forget to consider the overall campaign experience from your users’ perspective, especially for integrated campaigns spanning across multiple online properties. Ensure you have at least one centralized location for aggregating top-rated community content, and ensure all social media properties contain links out and back to your central destination.

As always, there’s lots to think about, but I hope this outline serves as a useful starting place.

Posted In: Marketing, Strategy, User Experience