Do you really need a community? The short answer to that is, “no”. You don’t need community centered around your blog. You don’t need to build a community around your product. You don’t even need to build a community around your service. Certainly plenty of businesses have gotten by without a community throughout the years, and most of them did just dandy. So no. You don’t need a community.
Now let’s explore what happens when you don’t build a community for your business.
- There’s no effective word of mouth campaign – Certaily you can advertise, but the best way to create a buzz around your product is to have others, who are not employed by you, using, discussing and recommending your product or service.
- Your product or service has no voice. It’s generic and antiseptic without a human touch. Folks like to be able to speak with humans.
- Your customers are frustrated. They want to chat with live folks or call and have a response instead of a menu. They want to be able to look online and see what others are saying about you.
- Your competition, the one with a large online community, is doing very well while your sales are down. All because their community and community managers have built up a level of trust.
- You don’t have a lively, congenial, helpful group of people gathering together and enjoying each others company to talk about one of their favorite things – your product or service.
So I will ask you – do you really need a community?
