Building an engaging online community

Your organization has gained an enviable level of traction and notoriety. Early adopters love your product; evangelists believe in the mission. Inspired, your employees are all in. Thanks to influencers and bloggers, your brand is showing up on your industry’s “Top 100” and “Best of” lists. Th e media perhaps both traditional and digital respect your work, or at least your potential. You are genuinely making a difference. For an organization in this enviable position, what comes next in the Social Age? A community.

Specifically, an online community. More clearly defined, an online community is a group of Internet users with a passion for a brand or a cause, or who, at the very least, are bonded by a common purpose and bolstered by companionship. The best online communities leverage existing success, develop further trust, build exponentially more human relationships with existing and potential customers, and then exceed expectations. No pressure, right? In social media accomplishment, it really isn’t as difficult as it sounds. In fact, online communities span every conceivable industry and personal interest, including: ▶ Kiva, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo in crowdfunding ▶ SK Gaming and Gaming Voice for gaming enthusiasts ▶ TOMS and Warby Parker, with business models built on the premise of “doing good,” in social commerce ▶ Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj as the central figures in worship worthy celebrity based communities ▶ Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton in politics Th e list goes on and on. Nearly every industry has fi ne examples where the sense of community is so strong that the industry founders give the community not the business model, the founding team, or the marketing department full credit for the success they’ve achieved so far. THE POWER OF COMMUNITY Such is the case with YouTern, an online community for young careerists founded by coauthor Mark and his team. In late 2009, YouTern was envisioned as a value added service bureau for career centers. Th e company had one mission: help college students and recent graduates become highly employable in a really tough job market. There was only one problem: On campus career centers had zero budget to spend on outside vendors. Th e recession had decimated their ranks and their operations budgets. Mark’s team, just six weeks from launch in September, was at a pivot point. How could they as a self funded, lean start up generate the required passion for the company’s mission and enough traction for the brand to survive with virtually no advertising dollars allocated in the budget? The YouTern team created a plan a plan they believed in very much, a plan only a few organizations at the time had fully bought into: a content rich site that would provide immediate value to millions of potential users, supported exclusively through social media. Mark was reluctant well, way more than reluctant. He thought they were nuts. Th e only thing he knew about social media at the time was that his teenage children were always on Facebook instead of doing their homework. He had a LinkedIn account but had found no value from that site yet. He had no Twitter account. He didn’t even have a Facebook page. Yet Joe and Dave and Christina and Deb and Tony and Ellen all pushed Mark toward social. Th ey predicted that, moving forward, this was the way start ups would launch. They said that by providing valuable content, users hungry for contemporary career advice would not only find the site but help promote the mission. Th e students, recent grads, career experts, résumé writers, career services professionals, authors, and bloggers would all flock to a community where peer to peer networking, mentorship, coaching, and learning would happen organically. They would become “brand ambassadors” and YouTern would thrive through “doing good.” Mark called “B.S.” He didn’t buy it. He couldn’t lead this way. He lacked experience in social media; he wasn’t used to being out in front of the customer. He loved sitting back in a B2B (business to business) model helping those who actually helped others. And social media? Well, sticking his avatar up and articulating his thoughts for all to see frightened him, to say the least. Th ree months later, with zero progress for the business model thus far, Mark was finally convinced by Christina who had set up a Twitter account for him ninety days before to at least try a Twitter chat, to give it one shot. If he didn’t like it, fine, they’d seek investors and buy their launch using traditional advertising. So Mark agreed: “Fine, one Twitter chat, and then we drop this.” Th e next Monday, Mark joined #jobhuntchat, a career focused Twitter chat. Much to his stubborn surprise, he met 200 two hundred! job seekers, career experts, and recruiters he would never have met otherwise. He was thrilled by the selfless exchange of knowledge. He loved the balance of mentors to young careerists. He loved the leadership from Rich DeMatteo and Jessica Miller Merrell. Mostly, he loved the “give before you take” camaraderie that pervaded the sixty minute chat. Mark was hooked. Mark went social. And he never looked back. Blogging and value added content became YouTern’s operation model. Sharing knowledge in the career space the kind of advice that enabled young careerists to get jobs in the toughest of economies became the charter. Still, something was missing. Th e team, for all their passion, hadn’t reached that tipping point where social took over, where good happened organically. All members of the team worked without salaries for some time while YouTern gained traction. But they grew frustrated. “What do we have to do,” they thought, “to push this over the edge?” Th e answer: the press. But not through methods commonly used in the Industrial Age. No PR consultants. No campaigns. No campus tours. Nothing that would resemble advertising whatsoever. What happened? About a year after all the hard work started, YouTern began to appear on those “Top 100” and “Best of” lists. Mark himself was cited as a “Gen Y expert,” a champion for Millennials, and he even made a high profile list of the “100 Most Desirable Mentors.” He and the rest of the team began to guest blog for other career and Gen Y– related publications, gaining further exposure. Mark was asked to speak on college campuses (another anxiety producing stress point for Mark: public speaking!). YouTern’s blog, Th e Savvy Intern, was included on many lists of top career blogs. And then it happened: a tipping point called Mashable. In a major spread (at least for the career world), Mashable, a news website and technology and social media blog for the “Connected Generation” (think CNN for Millennials), listed YouTern as a “Top 5 Online Community for Starting Your Career.” YouTern’s world changed. Soon after, the site was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, Read Write Web, USA Today, and many more traditional media outlets. Mark found himself on Huffington Post and Bloomberg News, talking about the plight of highly educated but unemployable college graduates and what it would take in our new economy to make them employable. With the team putting in 100 hour workweeks for well over a year, YouTern reached that tipping point: It became an overnight sensation. In a success story that could happen only in the Social Age, and without spending one penny on traditional advertising, YouTern had become a community. Of course, for the ambitious startup team at YouTern, this wasn’t enough. With help in the form of blood, sweat, and a few tears from Dave Ellis, YouTern’s content and community manager, YouTern grew from seven posts per week to eighteen, then twenty. Dave curated the best available content from the best available authors. He and the social media team publicized the content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Groups, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and many other outlets. And he did so without spamming, without ever crossing the line into self promotion. The YouTern team then did the next logical thing at least according to “best practice” wisdom available in 2011. They started their own Twitter chat: #InternPro. With the help of Eric Woodard, they began a weekly show on BlogTalkRadio. Th ey launched a LinkedIn Group. In order to continue to create advocates, champions, and brand ambassadors, they dove even deeper into diversified content and provided even more value for their community. Today, YouTern remains a self funded startup with a huge community following. Each Monday, 100 to 200 people join the chat on Twitter. Th e site will see 1 million unique visitors in 2014. @YouTernMark and @YouTern are two of the top 20 Twitter accounts shared by recruiters and careerists. As a publishing brand, self funded @YouTern, with a staff of fewer than ten, is retweeted more than huge organizations like @USATODAY and @USNews and even mega job boards @Monster and @Careerbuilder. All this is accomplished on a shoestring budget, with no advertising dollars but built on the goodwill of the members of the career community who found YouTern to be a mentor driven, safe environment in which to ask tough questions, listen to the answers, and self learn. That is what a community does. It bonds its members to a common cause, a subculture, or an interest such as a music genre, a particular sport, or a television show. A community can also carry a brand that just a few short years or even months ago, no one had ever heard of. And it can throw social support to established brands like Coca Cola, Ben & Jerry’s, the National Hockey League, or Bill Clinton, all of whom have embraced social with open arms and are reaping the benefits. A community, in what remains a sometimes cynical, what’s in it for me world, brings people together. Welcome to the Social Age. For many organizations, building a community is more deliberate. (As we’ll see later, there are many companies that have tried desperately some successfully, some not to build online communities.) In YouTern’s case, however, the word community was never in the business plan or the executive summary. It was never discussed at board of adviser meetings or internally. It just happened. Organically. Without intention, but wonderfully welcome. By the way, as a virtual company with no brick and mortar office, YouTern’s break even point each month, not including salaries: less than $1,000.