Photo: tanguero

The idea of building a “community” around your brand – or around anything needs to be re-thunk. Yes, these are your passionate customers and they must be cared for with the utmost of appreciation. But watch the tools people use today to communicate every errant thought, and you’ll quickly see that you need to be watching everything, everywhere. Not just inside the wonderful community you’ve nurtured.

It’s great to have a Community Manager on staff. It is easily a full-time job for one, or even a team, to monitor and engage with the community that has signed up to be counted and heard. You have forums, feeds, review features – and it’s become an imperative to create brand-stations in all the places where your customers naturally congregate: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. But all this effort is rooted in the assumption that your current and potential customers have bothered to find you in these places. If you’re doing only this, you’ve lost your peripheral vision.

The evolution of online and mobile social communication tools in the last few years has created a consumer who can spit out Tourette’s-like bursts of praise and dissatisfaction about your brand almost as effortlessly as flipping open her phone. And as she does so, she knows that her friends will read it and if she hashtags appropriately, so will the world.

Give me one reason why they would be compelled to seek out your Facebook profile.

And that’s just today. Tomorrow’s Internet generation will expect to be always wired, always connected. Will they seek out your community? Or will they expect you to be listening? The new consumer entitlement is constant, 1:1 communication with any brand that wants their business. You need to seize every opportunity whenever and wherever it happens.