Over the past 4 years I have been thinking about how to get individuals involved with and participating within a community. It is not an easy thing to get a group of individuals comfortable with your site and each other to the point of participating and caring when they become a true community. While I will continue to learn, I wanted to share what I see as the phases to the development into a community and their participation. The core concept of the model is pretty simple. People need to build their trust and loyalty with a community before they will actively engage and care about it. This model proceeds through phases building on trust where interactions gradually increase in their threshold of interactivity. The five stages of the community engagement model are...

I recently finished reading Robert Ciadini’s Yes: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. This book never once mentions social media or marketing but its principles are gold to anyone who has anything to do with social media. The principle that I think that everyone can gain value from is social proof. At a very high level social proof is simple fact that we all look for cues from others on how to participate within a community (or any environment)...

Marketers need to understand that the dynamics of conversations with online audiences have fundamentally changed. The lessons from Motrin, Dell, WalMart, JetBlue and others that have been called out by bloggers, Twitter-storms and others enabled by social media is not a passing fad, but something that needs to be recognized as a new marketing reality. As such, marketing organizations need policies for when (not if) there is a backlash to something that their organization has done that is unpopular...