4 ways to grow Word of Mouth for your Brand community | HM Issue #3
How to get people talking about you?
Dear Hive Makers,
The statistics of the previous issue of HiveMakers was kind of nice
But I got real belief in its impact when Megha Anotra, a community enthusiast, wrote a full post on LinkedIn about our weekly newsletter.
and Tejasvi Bongirwar, who is building an amazing education products business Luma World, refueled this belief
And then came the message from Anurag Pathak, an education leader, who helped me correct my typos and mistakes
You cannot think of building a community without your early believers, supporters, friends, and critics
The big question is
why do they believe in you?
why are they helping you?
And if you try to feed your curiosity about this generosity by these 3 amazing people, you can really learn a big lesson for growing your brand community (or your brand/business/whatever you want to call it)
Do you also want to do it for your brand community?
Think now, How?
What if you can understand, what drives Megha, Tejasvi, and Anurag, to share about me or help me
What if they themselves understand it, Can’t they be better off in their respective jobs
Can you share your thoughts here in the comments?
While you think about more ideas, let me share a few of mine on the topic
Hope you are ready to explore?
Idea 1 | Appreciate the good work
Just think, If you stop treating people in the ecosystem as competitors, and start treating them as partners, they may remember you, recall you, and may even talk about you
If you start seeing them as ecosystem enablers just like you
suddenly you are not afraid of them
suddenly you become friends with them
and you can genuinely appreciate the nice work by them
When I started working on Online communities, I kind of met some really amazing people who were already helping the ecosystem
Now, just think If Vineet Nandan Gupta, an established community Strategist & Growth consultant, suddenly starts talking about me and my work
will it help my newsletter?
Of course, it would do
So why should I wait for him to take the first step
Why can’t I start talking about his good work first?
Varalakshmi is running Community & Cold Coffee, an amazing community for Community Managers.
Because of the good work that she is doing, her initiative has already gained immense credibility and is growing like a rocket
Just think If she introduces me at one of her events as an invited speaker, will I get some increased level of recognition in the market?
No doubt about that
NOTE | She is a first-mover here as she already invited me to her very first event as the guest speaker
Recently I subscribed to All Things community a weekly newsletter by Jenny Weigle who runs her very revered community consultancy (Shout out to her newsletter, must read and subscribe. (I have already done that)
Do you think, it will help my newsletter if she writes about me in her newsletter?
Don’t you think, that would be a dumb question to ask?
But is it certain that all or even one of them would write about me in their newsletter, social media, or any other place of influence
It should not be.
Your friends may do personal favors to you but their content is their credibility
It is their commitment to their followers
So no one should write about you unless s/he really believes in what you are doing
I believe Megha, Tejasvi, and Anurag must have really trusted me for what I am doing
and only then they wrote about me
others may or may not understand it
So,
Do not be pushy
Do not be demanding
Do not be selfish
people may take time
and you should be fine with that
In the same way, you should also mention only those
in whom you believe yourself
You do not need to wait to appreciate the good work
And remember,
there should be no strings attached
No expectations
Don’t worry
today or in future
whenever they will gain trust in you,
they might end up endorsing your work
and if not, someone else will do
BTW | Do remember to subscribe to Jenny’s newsletter
No fluff, It is Needle moving stuff
(statement courtesy Biswajeeta as she replied on one of my tweets and I just loved it)
She is an amazing community manager herself, do look at her profile. I am already willing to collaborate with her on my upcoming projects (if she has bandwidth).
Idea 2 | Think about a larger good
Wherever you are working, whatever you are doing, there is definitely an opportunity to do something good for society.
At HiveMakers, we knew that hundreds of thousands of jobs for a brand community manager will arise within the next few years here in India itself
But there is no steady supply of the talent
So we started conceptualizing a FREE one-week online event CMO (Community Management Opportunity) towards the end of October, to make masses aware of the role of a community manager and opportunities in this space.
We are planning to host this event during the third/fourth week of October 2021.
This online event will help aspiring CMs to listen to and interact with existing CMs to get an initial start.
I discussed the idea with Chitra HL who currently works at JFrog and understands community Analytics and DevRel very well and he has helped various organizations in this space.
Not only she supported the idea but also accepted to contribute her time
Then I spoke to Parul Gupta, who is the founder of The Community Makers Club, a raving community of community makers.
She is currently a Community Manager with a Technology company Like Chitra, she also supported the idea and accepted to be a part of this project.
And likewise, we are reaching out to more CMs who would like to contribute their time to this cause.
(A total of 3 hours distributed in 30 to 60 minutes slot at a time)
If you think, you can, do reach out
Now let’s come back to the question
If this project goes fine,
If these people liked the experience.
Do you think, they will share about HiveMakers?
Of course, they will do
Everyone wants to share positive things, everyone wants to help
But here we have clarity, we are not doing it merely for promotions
We are doing it for the larger good
Can you think of something good that your brand community can create for the larger good?
Idea 3 | Ask for help
When I could see things are coming up in shape, I started thinking, who will help us in enhancing the outreach for this program, managing the program, structuring the program, and many other facets
so that more and more people may leverage this opportunity
And you see we wanted help from large organizations
or those who have a large outreach
Since this program will help the following people
College students (direct or through Higher Education Officials)
Educated Mothers who want to come back to the job
People who want to switch jobs
People who might be between the jobs
Early level Community Managers
Community Builders
& Community enthusiasts like me
I am looking for those organizations that may help us reach out to them
My friend Manish Chhabra, the founder of the Indian Education Network, a well-established organization in the Higher Education space, did not think twice to support this initiative.
IEN has a very strong and large network in Higher Education within India and abroad
and this way, we may reach out to college students
I was also looking for an organization in the women entrepreneurship space.
And through the internet, I found Her Entrepreneur network
and I was so convinced that I kind of desperately wanted to collaborate with them
Their work is so convincing.
Just visit their website to understand the difference
Ruchi Mittal started this initiative long ago and then Priyanka Changia joined hands and today they run an amazing organization that supports more than 10,000 women entrepreneurs
Just imagine if they find our program making sense and If they agree to support the project, CMO will be able to help a lot of women entrepreneurs.
Maybe these entrepreneurs want to build their own brand communities,
maybe they want to hire CMs,
maybe they want to offer Community Management as a service to brand communities
immense possibilities
what is in our hand is to ask,
And that’s what we did
but even if communities like HEN collaborate with us or not,
we genuinely support their good work
Likewise, we wanted to have an online platform to organize this event efficiently and we reached out to Pensil
Both the cofounders Surender Singh and Anil Meena, at Pensil liked the idea and happily provided us with the necessary platform support for the event.
We invite any and everyone who is interested in Community Management Opportunity | CMO to join through the following link
We are talking to more and more organizations who may like to help us in this work of impact
After all, it is about asking for help.
Idea 4 | Start a Word of Mouth Campaign
Even when people are happy about your product or service,
forget happy,
even when they are delighted
they do not think about sharing about you
It is your job to ask them to talk about you
and what do you expect from them?
But, how would you do that?
Create a Word of Mouth campaign
For example, right now our focus is to create to get more and more subscribers for our FREE weekly newsletter about Building, Growing, and Managing Brand Communities
Right now, we are at 32 subscribers
and we decided to launch ‘The Haunted Hundred’
We are planning to launch this campaign in a couple of days, where we want our supporters to help us beat the 100 subscribers mark ASAP
While for the general public, it will be launched in a couple of days, for our subscribers, supporters, and believers
It starts right now
We are asking you to help us grow to 100 subscribers within the next 10 days
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Hope you find these ideas worthy and they help you to grow a word of mouth around your brand community
We are now keen to listen to your ideas
Will you share your thoughts in the comments?
Thank you so much in anticipation
Best Wishes
Anupam Kaushik
Founder HiveMakers