What Social Business Can Learn from Match.com
Now, we’re going to change it up a bit. Today, let’s talk dating!
Didn’t see that coming did you? Stay tuned. There is a moral to this topic… promise!
First I have to mention, some of the most incredibly rewarding experiences in my business career have been to deliver industry and member communities for associations. I have done this now for 8 years. Consequently, community vitality is now my purpose, promise, and passion. Drawing from this background, I’ve come to the realization that successful online communities must have a clear purpose and stimulate relationships. This goes for both associations and businesses.
Match.com is all about generating meaningful connections for their community members. Not much different from the purpose of your community, right? With this in mind, what about considering a mentoring-matching program to enable employees to gain professional training and development? Or, what about customers being matched to the appropriate sales associate, based on interests, region and business need? Certainly, some ideas to mull over. There’s so much we can learn from the successes of online-dating applied to social business.
Community begins with purpose and flourishes with relationships. Creating an online community for your employees and customers is the cornerstone in establishing the foundation for these relationships. Caught and almost lost in the web of doing business through social media is the art of establishing a “human” business. More and more, the art of “being human” is relevant to business social success, even spawning a whole book by Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter, “Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World”. It’s more than being authentic… it’s about being a real person. (Shameless promotion: stay tuned to the Avectra blog for announcements on Humanize as our next book of the month club, and a topic for an upcoming California SAE webinar on December 15th, sponsored by Avectra). 
Paramount to achieving your business objectives and keeping your audience engaged, your social media plan should be designed to influence, captivate and inspire consumer confidence. The truth is, today successful marketing is contingent on priceless qualities like trust and integrity, rather than large marketing budgets. Built within your community should be a proactive, ‘we care’ service ethic, with ‘we do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do’ as your community aphorism.
Purpose comes before strategy. Once the strategy is in place, then its decision time as far as which tools will help you execute your strategy. I think we can all agree that acquiring and maintaining a sound strategy is integral toward building your community. Nonetheless, you don’t want to focus on the strategy and tools alone. Tony Ebikeme writes, “Strategy isn’t the goal. It’s the path you plan to take to get there.” So have you thought about the purpose of social business and why your customers or employees would want to be engaged?
I use social media every day in some form or fashion and it is clear that every site, internally and externally has a different purpose. One of the ways to gain exposure and activity to your social business is to leverage external social media sites. The extent of using external sites depends on both your purpose, and the external site’s purpose. For example, Facebook is for friends, (but may also be good for business just because it has the most users, 600 million). LinkedIn seems to satisfy business-related purposes, Match.com is for dating, and an association member community is for the purpose of a particular trade or profession.
Suffice to say, you wouldn’t really try to connect to your customers on Match.com (that may be weird). However Match.com may be a benchmark for facilitating community relationships… the second success factor to focus on. “Although having a benchmarking methodology may in itself seem something of an expensive luxury - it can reap huge rewards, not only in performance but in establishing valuable strategic alliances. In ‘s addition, low cost mini-benchmarking can prove highly effective - after all it is the ideas for profitable change that you are seeking, not an entire 'crib sheet' to copy another organization's e-service or another country's entire strategy!” - E-Service-Expert.com
I think Farra Trompeter‘s ten best practices for using Social Media summarizes this article appropriately:
1. Take a deep breath, and let go. You’re not in control anymore.
2. Stop, look and listen. Tie your goals to what people need, and meet your audiences where they are
3. Build your strategy around reality Select the tools based on their purpose, your audience and what you can manage in terms of staff time and costs.
4. Remember what you learned in kindergarten: be nice, share, and say thank you.
5. Emphasize the social in social media. Schedule calls, meetups and events to connect online communities.
6. Get personal.
7. Be flexible. Your community will move around; the tools are going to change
8. Don’t forget your website and integration. Bring all your online communications together and repurpose content.
9. Change how you define success. It’s about content rather than numbers; relationship building rather than ‘marketing’.
10. Pause and evaluate. Keep listening, and give yourself time to build community, trust and conversation.
Get more from Farra and BigDuck here.
Oh! One more question, - as a community manager, do you think you could write off your Match.com subscription as Research & Development expense?
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