Lets go big today. If you have a $40,000 budget and your competitor has a $4,000 budget. What advantages do you have when it comes to building an online community? To put simply, what will get you for your extra resources and money?
- Hire the Best. You can afford the people with the most experience. This means less time wasted on mistakes and a much greater chance of success.
- Faster Growth . You have more of the builder’s time, or more than one builder. This means more time for research, more personalised e-mails and more people joining the community at the early stages. This pay dividends for the rest of the project. You can also give builders a list of thousands of customers they can approach. This helps.
- Instant Eager Helpers. More builders/time mean more conversations. If you ever have any request, or product trials or work to delegate to the community, the builders should know the right people for the job.
- More Initiatives to Grow the Community. You should expect more initiatives a week designed at growing your community.
- Tighter Community. Your community should be closer to one another. You should expect some real-life meetings to have taken place between members. Perhaps sponsored by you.
- Big Characters. The community builders should be able to attract the most prominent people in your industry to join, and participate more.
- Sub Communities. Your community builder(s) should be able to foster sub-communities and groups with a specific focus and motivation. These sub communities might will be very focused, powerful and extremely more efficient at handling certain takes.
- More PR. A spot of PR probably wont go amiss with that size budget.
- Big To Huge. You can example that when the time comes, the resources you have should really be able to ramp the community into overdrive. Perhaps add a link on all outgoing e-mails? Or tell customer service teams to refer people to the community for extra help.
- Best Reputation. From having the man-hours to do everything right, your company should develop a reputation, like Dell, of ‘getting’ social media. Once you get it, you should be invited to industry events and interviewed by some top bloggers.
Do you have more? Add them.
