Going the Extra Mile

Doing something unexpected and genuine will always win me over. It doesn't take much, just a small bit of attention that lets me know that you were paying attention to me.

This week after meeting Jason Peck briefly and exchanging some dialogue (and a promise to meet up again at BlogWorld) he sent me this video.

Wow. Between him and Jackie Adkins? I'm going to have to step my community game up.

Do you know why both these approaches worked so well?

Simplicity, attention to detail and personality.

Companies need to allow this sort of personality to flow into their day-to-day operations. Whether it be in customer service, external communication or product creation. You need to make the experience contextually relevant for the customer or client. Communities around your brand can only prosper when they are inspired, consulted with or work together towards a common goal.

The best way to elicit these kind of responses? Transparency, promotion of others besides yourself and creating smaller goals and projects within the larger community. Individual attention to community members is required for your success here. Community managers need to be at the heart of the community body and pump blood to each and every extremity.

Think individualized approaches don't work? Or aren't scalable? I raise you Google.

Google rose from relative obscurity to complete and utter dominance via a very powerful search algorithm and a killer business model that allowed them to focus on developing their search technology: contextualized advertising.

By creating a personalized experience for the consumer, Google was able to drive sales for their advertising partners through contextual searching. The Google mythos is still alive because it delivered on personalized experiences and actually gave people what they wanted. (On the first try!)

Contextual ads are standard practice now and will continue to improve in quality, relevance and conversion effectiveness. The world expects relevance and individual attention. Thus, when you try and deliver a one size fits all approach to any layer of your business you turn off a lot of people.

The only way to be able to maintain individual attention AND effectively scale is to activate your community via the techniques and strategy laid out above. No quick fixes exist. You have to get faster, better and smarter about where you invest your time and resources. The ability to act as one cohesive unit might soon become obsolete as your deputized evangelists take your value prop to places you never thought possible.

Give your community the keys and trust them. You don't have a choice anymore.

tagged as attention to detail, BlogWorld, business model, contextual, external communication, extra mile, personality in marketing, search algorithm