A zillion great ideas from the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference.
- When you open up to customer participation, your brand belongs to your customers, not you.
- Use your product every day. It aligns your interests with your customers’. It lets you fix problems as they happen. It lets you see things as a user, which is always more helpful than seeing it as a marketer.
- Turn the bullhorn around. Stop talking. Give the community a chance to speak.
- There is no such thing as a "community strategy". The community will do what it wants. Go with it.
- Join conversations early. Negative gets worse if you don’t respond. Positive grows when you do.
- Why pay for product photos? Encourage your community to share their product photos. They may even blog about the fact that you chose their photos.
- Sounding "professional" does not require you to sound like an ass. You don’t need formal language or big words. Talk like a human being. Talk to people online like you talk to your friends.
- The great thing about communities is that you can hear from everyone. The bad thing about communities is that you can hear from everyone.
- It’s ok to moderate and set rules of civil discourse. You can politely refuse to engage with ranters who don’t want to have a civil conversation.
- Your community will support you if you enable them. When a critic gets vocal, let your fans reply instead of you.
- Listen to experts but design for novices.
From the panel "Customer service as community, community as customer service"
- Gina Bianchini, Ning
- Matt Mullenweg, WordPress
- Tara Huntl, Citizen Agency
- Patti Roll, Timbuk2
- Brian Oberkirch, Small Good Thing