Noémie Kempf on The Audiencers

How to turn passive followers into active community members

Noémie Kempf — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 05:15:00 +0000

Noémie is an author, podcaster and independent consultant specializing in communities, brand content and brand strategy. She authored the book “Le pouvoir des communautés” (The Power of Communities”), published by Eyrolles in September 2023. Co-founder of Komuno, the first community building school in France, she is also the creator of The Storyline, a media magazine that explores the future of consumer habits - and their impact on brands. 

You can find  her first article on The Audiencers, The Social Media Manager role is dead, long live the Community Builder! here.

In recent years, Starbucks’ market capitalization has exceeded $100,000 billion, joining the very private club of “hectocorns” (aka, unicorns on steroids – privately held startups valued at $100 billion). Faced with these impressive figures, it’s hard to believe that just 15 years ago, when Howard Schultz took over the reins, the American coffee giant was in dire financial straits.

After expanding too rapidly, its shares had lost 42% of their value. 600 stores had to be closed and 12,000 employees laid off.

But Schultz decided to take a gamble that was considered risky at the time: rather than investing in advertising, social networks or even the product, he focused on the customer experience, and more specifically on the community strategy.

The rest is history… And today, the Starbucks brand, although highly controversial (notably concerning the working conditions of its employees), is an indisputable benchmark in its sector, benefiting from a highly committed community. And the company is far from the only one to have relied on the collective for its development…

Community-as-a-business gas pedal

It’s no secret that the community has become an incredibly powerful lever for companies that know how to harness it.

Sephora, for example, has created the Beauty Insider community in the United States, bringing together 17 million cosmetics enthusiasts who are now responsible for 80% of the company’s sales in the US!

In addition to revenue, a community strategy can also have a positive impact on brand equity, commitment (which is far better in a community than on social networks) and customer retention rates – provided it is properly implemented…

But don’t get ahead of yourself!

Brands often confuse their followers on social networks with members of a community. There’s a big difference!

Your followers (and more generally, your audience) are the individuals who follow your publications and online content in a rather passive way. They interact with your brand from time to time, through a like, a comment or a message. However, the relationship usually ends there – and on social networks, it’s still very difficult to convert followers into customers.

In the community, however, members interact not only with your brand, but also with each other. They exchange tips, start conversations, create value for each other… In short, in a community, there’s much more action and interconnection between individuals than on social networks. And that’s why social networks aren’t generally suited to fostering community interaction!

To launch a successful community, you’ll need several ingredients. Starting with the right tool…

From followers to community members: the essential ingredients for creating a community

The right tool to encourage conversation

In a community, the success of your strategy depends above all on interactions between members. If there’s no conversation, there’s no life. And the community soufflé runs the risk of falling as quickly as it rose…

To avoid this unpleasant situation, you need to choose the most suitable tool for hosting your community.

Depending on the profile of your members (and the size of your community), you have several options: some brands choose to host their communities on Discord (like the Adobe creative community), others, like CFO Connect, prefer Slack, whilst others choose more advanced tools like Circle, an all-in-one community platform.

A solid content and animation strategy

The second stop on the road to an engaged community: the engagement strategy. Because, unfortunately, a community doesn’t animate itself!

To bring it to life, you’ll need to devise a real strategy based on relevant content that will capture the interest of your members and encourage them to get involved in animating your community.

In-depth articles, guides, podcasts… It’s up to you to identify and test out the subjects and formats that will hit the nail on the head!

Events to unite your members

An essential component of a community animation strategy. Events (online or offline) are an opportunity for your members to forge links with each other, and thus strengthen their attachment to the community.

For example, at Team for the Planet, a company that fights climate change, an online event is organized every week, during which community members can ask questions and interact with the team. Other communities prefer to get together less frequently, but more intensely, like the Harley Davidson community, which has been meeting for 83 years at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, bringing together nearly 500,000 motorcycle enthusiasts for ten days every year.

From passive audiences to an active community

As you can see, far from the top-down relationship that often dictates the relationship between brands and their followers on the networks, the community approach requires you to involve your members in a much more participative, co-creative relationship.

The other sine qua non of a successful community? Finding the right balance between the value your brand offers its members, and the business objectives supported by the community strategy…

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The Social Media Manager role is dead, long live the Community Builder!

Noémie Kempf — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 05:15:00 +0000

There was a time when, on Facebook as on Instagram, a motivated Social Media Manager and a well developed communications strategy were enough to get a brand off the ground. Sézane, Bergamotte, Tediber, Horace, Shanty Biscuits… The 2010s marked the advent of Digital Native Vertical Brands (DNVB). Lifestyle brands that built their success on an impeccable mastery of digital channels.

Today, however, the tide is turning. Instagram is being criticized for its impact on mental health. There’s one bad buzz after another across the platforms (Amazon Prime in 2023, Balenciaga in 2022, etc.). And young internet users are demanding ever more authenticity and transparency from the brands they consume…

These trends are not insignificant. They reveal a profound transformation in the dynamics of social media communication, and in what consumers expect from brands. In response to these changes, a new profession is emerging. The Community Builder, tasked with connecting and developing trust with a company’s ever-changing audience.

Is social media the no-man’s-land of communication?

The golden age of social media platforms as amplifiers of visibility and pedestals for companies to develop seems to be behind us.

At a time when accusations of greenwashing are pouring in (Air France here, BNP Paribas there…), most brands feel they’re walking on eggshells when it comes to speaking to their audiences and consumers.

What’s more, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out on social platforms.

Content saturation. On Instagram, 95 million photos and videos are posted every day
The decline in organic engagement, influenced in part by algorithms that favour certain, very specific types of content
The monetization challenges faced by social media platforms mean that they deliberately limit the organic visibility of corporate accounts in order to prioritize their own paid-for offers

As a result, engagement rates are down across all sectors, and online brands are faced with very passive audiences.

But it takes a lot more than that to discourage some pioneering companies. Those who have responded by completely rethinking their marketing strategy, integrating a community component into it.

From passive audience to engaged community

In response to the transformation of social networks, a new marketing strategy has been emerging over the last few years. One that involves moving from audience to community, something that not only supports the brand as it grows, but directly impacts its growth.

This is what the cosmetics brand Nidé.co has done, for example, by asking members of its community to suggest ideas for new products. If the idea receives more than 2,000 votes in the community, it goes into production and is marketed. Profits from sales are then shared with the co-creator.

The company specialises in clean cosmetics, a growing trend in makeup and skincare. But instead of creating products that it feels fit the most people the best (or looking at it another way, with the least compromises), Nide looks for niches by asking its consumer base what they really want from their products.

‘Have you ever said, when speaking to your friends, “If only this thing existed”?’ Nide’s website asks. Nide wants you, the consumer, to share those wild wishes with it so that you can “Co-create Tomorrow”.

You’re probably wondering how, in practical terms, it’s possible to achieve such a feat. That’s what the role of the Community Builder is all about. As the true representative of the brand, lending its voice and face to humanize it, the Community Builder is a guarantor of the community’s commitment.

The community approach seeks to go further than Social Media Management. As well as relaying the brand’s messages, Community Building consists of creating a space dedicated to exchanges between members of the community, opening up a dialogue between the brand and them. And of course, to encourage this dialogue, the Community Builder is essential.

From Social Media Manager to Community Builder: focus on a new profession

Working at the crossroads between strategy, human resources, management and communication, the Community Builder is a highly versatile profile. Whereas Social Media Managers (or Community Managers) are generally responsible “solely” for feeding content into the brand’s social networks, the Community Builder’s role covers a wider range of responsibilities:

Defining community strategy and the related business KPIs (conversion, retention, loyalty, brand visibility, etc)
Creating and animating a community space that brings members together, achieved through speaking out, creating content, organizing events, etc
Implementing growth strategies for the community. For example by creating an ambassador program or deploying a strategy for acquiring new members on social
Liaise with internal teams who can benefit from the community’s feedback or actions: marketing, product, customer support, sales, etc.

Although still in its infancy, the job is already highly sought-after. In May 2023, on LinkedIn, there were almost 28,500 job offers containing the keyword “community”.

A trend that’s not going to slow any time soon, as companies realize that the age of Social Media Marketing is coming to an end and that internal changes are needed to adapt and survive.

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