Online communities are all about interaction and building relationships. In order to engage members of communities, it’s important to first become a trusted member of that community. There are essentially two ways that you can go about participating in existing communities: direct engagement and indirect engagement.

Direct engagement may sound straightforward, but where it can get tricky is in the practical application. This is a kind of longtail strategy, because it is so imperative to build trust within that community. The best practice is to have someone acting as a brand ambassador who is a trusted member of the community, and to ensure that your products or services have some relevance to the community’s interests.

With indirect engagement, you’ll be working with third-parties who can help to increase your brand’s awareness in the community without arising suspicion. If you can get together with members of specific communities who wield a certain amount of influence, then you may be able to offer them opportunities to announce “sneak peeks” into products or promotions.

It is essential to maintain good relationships with these third-parties. With this in mind, never ask them to exploit their status or deceive them into doing so. A bad relationship with a third party can serve to hamper your efforts, instead of help.

The rewards are palpable for those who make the effort to create interest in their brands in specific communities. Let’s take a look at some stats (source):

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users
(AT&T, 2002)
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users
(McKinsey, 2000)

As with every aspect of every successful business enterprise, trust is a key aspect, and relationships are what help to build that trust. Consumers don’t purchase products until a trust has been established, and social media can be a great way to establish relationships as a means of establishing that trust.

Using social media to accomplish this might take some time, but is worthwhile for anyone attempting to build brand awareness in these exciting new markets.

Q: What is the most important consideration for affiliate marketing and the software that powers those programs?

A: The important thing to consider with affiliate marketing is that it’s really performance-based marketing. If it’s performance-based marketing, what a retailer/merchant or affiliate needs in terms of software is the ability to see accurate information. Accurate information can be measured in terms of which affiliates are promoting, or how a banner is converting. This can also be keeping track of what affiliates are doing.

Q: How can merchants keep track of affiliates?

A: Usually in a program, there is a percentage of affiliates that are consistently producing very good traffic, and there can be other affiliates that are producing a volume of traffic, that may not be as high quality. Looking at the metrics of a program is very important, and that includes being able to track a campaign from the clicks, to the conversions to the retention of the customers.

Q: Why is the ability to look at historical trends so important?

A: When a merchant has access to historical trends, they can analyze trends over a period of time, from season to season, or trends that occur from year to year—and this is crucial information. Also, merchants can see what affiliates have done in the past, and what they’re doing currently, which is also a powerful activation tool. This is not necessarily on a granular level, but definitely on a trend level.
At the end of the day the most important features of software that merchants should look for are transparency, accuracy and reliability.

Well, when I recently sat down with some of our team to discuss a variety of topics from affiliate marketing and relationship management to online community and the economy, they brought along a video camera. After having some fun with the footage, the team finally showed it to me, and I thought “what better place to put it than my new blog?”

Here is the first and five installments that came out of that session, and in it I discuss how changes can often mean new opportunities for businesses. I hope that you enjoy watching it as much I enjoyed doing these. Although I’m still a little uncomfortable with the format, I just might consider some more video in the future.

iPhone Version