This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Building a Community.

We’ve covered some pretty basic concepts that companies and marketers need to consider when they are starting to build a community in social media and I’d like to round out this weeks topic with the importance of Learning the Rules of the Road.  Communities have them for a reason, and if you don’t pay attention to them, you can really find yourself either in a heap of trouble with community members or out in the cold and having no friends or allies to build a community with.

Read the Written Rules

When a community posts its rules for everyone to see and read, they mean it.  You may get lucky if your break one of their written rules once by exclaiming “you didn’t know there were rules”, but if it’s a rule that was put in place because it angers community members and they know you are a marketer, claiming that you “didn’t know” might not be something that saves you.

Over the years admins of communities have been hammered by spammers, and abused by marketers.  For these reasons, a lot of times, this is why the rules are posted.  You might not be allowed to drop a link, you might not be allowed to be promotional, you might not be allowed to use your company’s logo as an icon, you won’t know unless you read the rules first.  The rules can be your friend, they can help guide you through the ins and outs of the community as well as give you subtle queues and hints into the reasons why the rules are there in the first place.  The last thing you want is for your actions to be a reason another rule is written, so read them and use them wisely.

Learn the Unwritten Rules

The unwritten rules, or norms, are a bit trickier to navigate in the beginning.  These rules aren’t written anywhere and the only way you really get to know them is to first, observe and then engage.  The first layer of norms you’ll be able to see when you watch how the community interacts.  Perhaps the community is a bit relaxed and a small bit of vulgarity is acceptable, or it can be a completely professional and conservative community where if you use any remotely vulgar language in your engagement, you’ll find yourself shunned.  That takes observation to figure out.

The second layer of norms that you may encounter isn’t until you actually start engaging.  The way you interact with people can have a whole other set of norms you won’t uncover until you start making friends in the community.  Maybe there are back conversations going on behind what’s posted publicly.  You won’t find that out just by lurking.  Once you start building the relationships you’ll find that the members might converse off the site via IM, or email or the private message system the community offers.  These unwritten norms can be tough to learn and slow going, but in the end are well worth learning to move your efforts forward.

When you learn the rules and use them as a guide, whether they are posted for all to see or you have to figure them out, you’ll be much better off than if you just jumped into the community with both barrels blazing and pissing community members off because you didn’t take the time to respect them or their community rules.

This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Building a Community.

Transparency can have many levels and if you are a company that is planing to send your marketers into social media communities, making sure your companies actions are transparent on all levels is a very important part of building a community.    Building solid relationships built on trust is what makes your efforts continuously success in social media, it’s also what will bolster you up when firestorms hit.

Be Transparent About Who You Are

Let’s face it, in any community, the members are smart.  They are in there day in and day out, conversing, sharing, and experiencing.  They form relationships and can queue in instantly to anything that remotely smells of a fake.  The worst thing any company can do is go into a community and “disguise” themselves as a customer or fan.  The moment you start interjecting that your brand is great, your brand would be a solution, or just automatically start talking about your products, services or company, without establishing yourself first, trust me, the jig is up.

Community member protect their own, whether it’s other members or the integrity of the community itself.  The moment they smell an impostor, they are hot on the trail to dig up who that person is.  In today’s day and age, you might think you are anonymous, but admins in these communities can see your IP address.  An email to the technical team of any social networking site about suspicious activity will send that IT person on a trail to hunt down who you really are.  When that become public – and trust me it will, you won’t ever have another shot with your community again.

This is why its important for the very start off in your community building efforts with being transparent about exactly who you are and don’t try and hide it in covert ways.

Be Transparent About Your Intentions

Right up there with being honest about who you are when you engage with different social media communities is to make sure you are very transparent about your intentions for joining the community.  If you are there to gain a better understanding about what people think about your company, say so.  If you are there to just listen, engage and share, say so.  If you’re there just to hand out coupon codes, make sure you are very upfront about it.

A huge misstep would be to say “hey we’re just here to listen and learn” and then the next week start posting links to your weekly or daily promotions.  That’s one way to piss off a lot of community members really fast.  It’s also the quickest way to a cold shoulder from community members.  Stating your intentions and sticking to them is a very foundational concept that marketers miss a lot of times with all the excitement of implementing their social media tactics.  Once they dig in and see all the possibilities, this totally miss the opportunity to make sure they are transparent about their new intentions and then soon find themselves out in the cold of the community they just joined.

Be Transparent About Changes Within Your Company

When ever change comes to your company and your team knows about it, make sure you are transparent about that too.  The last thing you need is your social media marketing team hung out to dry with a community because they were made to look like they lied about some change that happened within your company that was beyond their control.  When changes happen, your social media team should be one of the first teams to know what’s going on.  Word travels in social media communities faster than you can imagine.   If your team is up front and honest with your chosen social media communities that the changes are coming to your product, services, company or even your employees your foundation of trust grows and your community feels more connected to you.

If they have to find out from another news source, it could look like you are hiding something from them, or worse you lied to them.  Neither of which bode well for you to keep building a solid community.

At the end of the day, trying to trick any social media community or keep information from them is a bad move.  When the truth comes out, you’ll have a worse firestorm on your hands.  At least if you’ve been transparent about who you are, your intentions and anything going on within your company you’ll have more of a fighting chance a building a solid community, one that may actually stand by you when those firestorms hit.

This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Building a Community.

This week starts our brand new series of thoughts on social media marketing in the area of Community Building.  Over the next three weeks, we’re going to feature pieces on:

• Building a Community
• Managing a Community
• Rewarding a Community

Keep in mind a community isn’t merely a forum or a message board, a community can be a fan page in Facebook, a tweetchat on Twitter, a photo group in Flick or your subscriber base in YouTube.  A community in social media can be anywhere, on any site and take many forms.

So lets jump right into it with looking at whether you should build your own social media community or just join an existing one.

There’s a lot of agencies and companies out there that sell a slick list of “things we can do for you” without even knowing what it is your company actually does, who your audience is or where they are currently interacting.  They’ve built really cool, whiz-bang tools that create super connected communities that are going to be the next, latest, greatest thing in social media … and you should sign up now!

Hold your horses there partner, you just might be putting that cart before the proverbial horse.

In the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing series, we talked about research in social media as well as human analysis in research.  This is something you definitely have to invest in before you even consider starting your own social media community just because an agency approached you with the idea.  There’s a lot of unanswered questions if you just throw up a “community” and expect people to automatically start participating.

Is There a Need?

You need to dig into your research and see if there is really a need to be filled.  Are people scattered in their conversations, or is there already some sort of established community out there.  Is there some sort of gap the existing communities are missing that you could possibly fill and build your own community with?  The reason you need to identify if there is a need for a new community is because it’s very difficult to get members to move out of a community they’ve already formed relationships with.  They come to trust and become very comfortable with their existing community, it can be a pretty tall task to just start a community and expect the existing one to move over to your platform, just because you built it.

What’s The Right Platform?

Along with your research you’re going to find out just how people are engaging and sharing in social media communities.  Just because there’s this new whiz bang platform some company is touting, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the platform your audience will want to use to communicate, engage and share.  If they are primarily on Twitter, it’s going to be pretty tough to move a community over to a forum more message board type of community.  If they are use to uploading photos and talking in groups, it’d going to be a tall order to move them over to your Facebook page.  Understanding if its the right platform is another key element to success or failure here.

How Will You Build the Community?

One of the other pieces you have to consider about building or joining a community is how will you build the community?  How will you promote it to get new members, how will you bring in the influentials?  What do you have to offer that’s special?  Will you rely on other forms of marketing and communications to drive interest in the community or will you rely solely on the one on one engagement and invitations to become an exclusive member?  What kind of community do you want to grow, one that’s private, one that’s semi-private or one that’s wide open?  How you build the community can be just as important as the need and the platform because it brings a lot of different personalities together to share and engage.

Just keep in mind, just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come to your social media marketing “field of dreams”.