You get what you give
Posted: Tue May 27, 2025 7:17 am
Forget abstract goals like 'creating direct involvement with the customer' and 'engaging customers'. Think in practical matters like 'learning from the customer how to do things better', 'giving employees more mandate' and 'working together step by step on improvement'.
Challenge the MT in the online community to communicate the vision, mission and goals of the organization in a way that everyone can understand and to enter into a dialogue about this.
Show all stakeholders through the online community that you, as an organization, really want to know what can list to data be improved and give them a voice.
Give employees the space and mandate to work on improvements step by step with the online community and make their successes visible.
Patience and perseverance
This may sound simple, but the opposite is true: an online community mainly requires a lot of patience and perseverance. Community-based working is not something you decide and arrange from one day to the next. It requires behavioral change, at all levels of the organization. A long-term process because people's conditioning is very strong.
Community management is not a magic bullet and certainly not a trick. It is a big job to ensure that the online community is (and remains) strategically relevant for all involved. Realize that the most successful communities are created when customer engagement is not the starting point, but a logical consequence. You get what you give away!
Challenge the MT in the online community to communicate the vision, mission and goals of the organization in a way that everyone can understand and to enter into a dialogue about this.
Show all stakeholders through the online community that you, as an organization, really want to know what can list to data be improved and give them a voice.
Give employees the space and mandate to work on improvements step by step with the online community and make their successes visible.
Patience and perseverance
This may sound simple, but the opposite is true: an online community mainly requires a lot of patience and perseverance. Community-based working is not something you decide and arrange from one day to the next. It requires behavioral change, at all levels of the organization. A long-term process because people's conditioning is very strong.
Community management is not a magic bullet and certainly not a trick. It is a big job to ensure that the online community is (and remains) strategically relevant for all involved. Realize that the most successful communities are created when customer engagement is not the starting point, but a logical consequence. You get what you give away!