Your customer community story – the 4 critical elements

We have developed an implementation methodology for brand communities over the last several years and projects; summarised as ECHOES (we will run out of allusions to ‘resonate’ eventually).

The ‘S’ stands for “Story” – the stance of interest that underpins the community and makes it interesting, moves the narrative forward and provides Clay Shirky’s “plausible promise” that lets participants feel other people will also find this interesting and a worthwhile investment of time.

For a brand community the Story is particularly important – neutral platforms where communities of interest, practice or celebrity can gather freely exist already; Facebook, LinkedIn… The Story has to be the reason participants gather in your venue rather than their own to have conversations about your category and brand.

Or else they will come to make ‘cash for comment’ – an approach we do not favour and generally leave to the online survey panelists.

I came across an excellent discussion of ‘dynamic stances’ in the context of challenger brands by Adam Morgan;  Eating the Big Fish . So good I am going to internalise his 4 critical elements and ensure they are in every community story we implement. The concepts that follow come from his book excerpt.

Stories must;

• be dynamic, move the narrative of the community forward, and the personal narrative of the participants
• have some inherent tension and conflict – which provide human interest to members.

So, the 4 elements;

1. Unexpectedness – “Stories that demand our attention never focus on the banality of life conforming to expectation”. What is the unexpected course we are looking to take with the community and why should they be interested in it?
2. The Inciting Incident – the moment the frustration got too much and we determined to start doing something different. “Some truth about why we embarked on our current new course, that makes it more than just this year’s positioning” The ‘Aha!’ moment.
3. The Objective – the desire created by the Inciting Incident. For a story to be compelling it has to be driven by a personal desire, coming from the inciting incident; an objective that propels the ‘brand’ and the community forward. We want to achieve something specific that is visible to the community. What is it we are trying to achieve?
4. Conflict. If there is no conflict in a story, it doesn’t move forward, and the way the brand deals with conflict reveals their true character. It is the source of energy for the conversation. What are we struggling to overcome?

An engaging brand community allows membership to know why they (the ‘brand’) started the community, what they are trying to do, what they are struggling against and who their enemy is. Perhaps even a sense of their hopes and fears – especially for us as members. Morgan gives a great example – he references a leading anthropologist who observed that President Clinton did not retain his popularity through all the scandals because people liked him, but because people though he liked them.

Good community moderators let the members know they are liked and respected; “We are not just target markets and demographics and share objectives – they share their stories with us, and invite us to participate with them in realising them.”

Reading this paper was one of my ‘Aha!’ moments.

The Buzz Exchange has some of these elements, take a look. (We helped with this one)

I wonder if I will ever get a client with a story as interesting as my namesake did….

No relation (damn)