Social Media for Business: Top 2 Keys for Successful Community Building

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook fan page, blogs, Squidoo, MySpace(?), Plurk. These and countless other social media tools exist to help your business build a community around the brand. But wanting community and achieving community are two different things. Anyone looking for a sure fire way to achieve success in building community for their company needs to keep these two points in mind above all others:

1. Always deliver value – use your social media presence as a way of giving useful information to the community – tips, links to resources, useful content, access to voices other than your own, access to each other, etc. That will attract and retain people and help you build a reputation as a community-focused organization rather than one that is just there for self-serving reasons. Reputation is everything in the social media realm. And it's true that the more you give the more you get in return.
2. Don’t start if you can’t commit – If you start off in social media by offering valuable, helpful content – which you should do – you have to maintain that and be consistently present and responsive. You can share the responsibility for being present and responsive among multiple people within the organization who opt in to that commitment, but it should be treated as seriously as any other job expectation. To me, it's like being on guard duty or on call: when it’s your turn, you are responsible. Nonetheless, while some of the on-call duty can be shared, I think it's wise to consider putting someone in charge of the operation and the strategy of that side of the business – i.e., the community manager. That person sets the strategy, maintains the schedule and is ultimately responsible for there being a consistent presence with a consistent focus on delivering value. Remember what Jeff Pulver has said about presence in the age of social media: "Presence is the new dial tone." Plug in a phone, you have to answer it when it rings. Start a presence in social media, you have to engage.

Thanks to Betsy Aoki, self-described "community diva" for Bing.com for inspiring these ideas during our conversation at last night's Tweetup here in Bellevue, WA.

What do you think? Are these your top 2?