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Creating Customer Community
 My company hosts a large customer conference each year. While the event is successful for our company — we exceed our attendance goals and consistently achieve a positive return on investment — we’d like to improve the sense of community among attendees. We want to help them interact more effectively with one another and with us, so that they feel part of something bigger than themselves and view our event as the place to connect with their colleagues.
We already include icebreakers, new-attendee sessions, and networking events in our conference agenda. What are some additional things we can do to help build a sense of community?
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Extend the
Experience Online
Before the event even begins, you can create an ongoing online community that provides your customers with a place to share questions and advice with one another and to share their suggestions, feedback, and unmet needs with you. The community might include detailed member profiles, facilitated dialogues, brainstorming sessions, surveys, galleries, or weekly activities such as a quiz or new blog posting from your company.
This online community will give your customers a chance to get to know one another before the event begins as they read each others’ profiles and start conversations with one another. These conversations can also help you shape the content and direction of the event itself as you monitor questions and themes that appear in blog posts, and build content to address those issues.
Once the face-to-face event is over, customers can continue the conversations they started at the event in an online forum, share resources, and even collaborate on projects. If you’re not ready to invest in an ongoing online community, here are three more ideas.
 Send out attendee bios before the event and invite customers to identify at least five other people they’d like to meet, and what they would like to discuss or learn. Then build in some time at the live event for a “café” session during which you bring these people together at tables with coffee, lunch, or other refreshments.
Use a survey or message board at the event to solicit ideas for “five things I’d like to ask or tell the [host company’s] CEO.” Then invite attendees to elect fellow attendees to sit on a panel with the CEO in a general session. Those who sit on the panel represent both themselves and other customers when posing questions and making points.
Publish an attendee directory for those willing to share their contact information. Then create an e-mail list, and at least once a month send the entire group a challenge, question, or inquiry on behalf of one attendee. To be sure the list doesn’t begin to feel intrusive, or worse, SPAM-like, make sure recipients can only respond directly to you. Consolidate all of the answers and advice into a single e-mail or brief report and share that information with the community as a whole.
 Julie Wittes Schlack,
vice president of innovation and design, and senior community consultant, Communispace Corp., Watertown, MA
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Start the Revolution
While I don’t know much about marketing, I know quite a bit about building a community. In 2000, I started a user group for Final Cut Pro, a movie-editing software. Our first event drew about 30 people. Today, the user group has more than 5,500 global members. We have monthly meetings that attract between 200 and 300 people and, with other Final Cut Pro User Groups from around the country, put on national SuperMeets that attract more than 1,500 people to one-night events.
So what can you do to foster a real sense of community among your customers? Not much.
The problem with fostering a sense of community is that unless there is an existing community to build an identity around, there is little that you, the event manager, can do. Community develops organically. It is something that just happens, usually as a result of a revolutionary idea or product. People are attracted to revolution. People crave being part of something bigger than themselves and people love being part of history in the making.
Do you have a revolutionary idea or product? If so, then you’ve got the potential for Community with a capital C. Just help it along by continuing to sponsor an exciting, valuable, and compelling event.
But what if your product or service is less than revolutionary? You can still help build community by making your customers the revolutionaries: Let them run the show. Or, at the very least, let them run the BIG event at your next big event.
First, identify a visionary hotshot among your customers. Ask if he would like to produce the “big event” at your next big event. Trust me: Rather than thinking this is some added burden to an already overburdened life, he will be flattered. In fact, expect a big “thank you” after he pulls himself up off the floor.
Give him a budget, venue, date and time, tech crew, and carte blanche to do whatever the heck he wants to do. The chances of him doing anything inappropriate are slim because you know each other, you trust him — and now it’s his reputation on the line.
What you are doing is allowing a customer whom many already admire and respect to shine. And customers listen best to other customers. Here’s someone in the trenches every day using your product, solving problems, and coming up with ideas you couldn’t possibly think of yourself.
And he will. He’ll immediately assemble a team and solicit ideas. That team will solicit ideas from others. And before you know it, you’ll have a team that feels part of something big — and that’s what you set out to achieve in the first place.
 Michael Horton, founder,
Los Angeles Final Cut Pro
User Group, Los Angeles
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Design With Data
We focus on creating what we call “intelligent community” at the several global events we execute each year. We call it intelligent community because we use technology to collect data about our community throughout the event process and then we act on that data to help our customers succeed. Here are five methods we use to build community at our events.
Connect attendees before the event. Use on-demand technologies to draw and connect registrants. We created ConnectOnDemand to offer a “Match.com-meets-MySpace” experience for business customers. Registrants securely and anonymously build a profile, find others with similar interests, and meet them online or on site at our events. In one year alone, more than 4,000 people signed up for ConnectOnDemand.
Use the right tools for the audience. Build different types of community solutions to satisfy unique audiences. At Salesforce.com, our business users prefer the MySpace feel of a community portal, while our developers prefer online forums where they can exchange code and quickly navigate threads.
Build smart communities. Analyze any data you have collected about your customers before the event (such as our ConnectOnDemand profiles), and use it to modify your on-site community plan.
Make connecting easy. Some events use products such as the electronic name badges created by nTag Interactive Corp. to connect people with similar interests on site. We use a variety of tactics, including a ConnectOnDemand café and facilitated roundtables arranged by vertical market and by role. You can even use something as simple and no-tech as a bulletin board or notes wall.
Keep them connected. After the event, sustain your community with easy access to content and local user groups. We commonly post event content online in various formats, including video, so the experience lives on after the event.
Customer events and user groups are not new, but with on-demand technologies, you can help those groups develop into self-sustaining communities before, during, and after your event.
Tom Wong, senior director
of customer marketing and Dreamforce event chair, Salesforce.com Inc., San Francisco
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