In the digital world, the importance of energizing online communities is critical to the success of your product or company. Following this sequence will help you build and leverage stronger online communities:
- Monitor, listen, and respond to your consumers online.
- Energizing: bring in your best brand ambassadors to evangelize your product.
- Supporting: help customers support one another to solve one another’s problems.
- Embracing: integrate customers into the way a business works, including using their help to design products and improve processes.
Enter Michelle Phan: YouTube celebrity, makeup extraordinaire, entrepreneur, and master of energizing online communities. Michelle has inspired countless of women around the globe through her beauty video tutorials. She has gained over 7 million subscription followers through viral videos, such as, turning herself into Angelina Jolie – see below:
Her influence in the beauty community led her to develop ipsy, a booming $84 million e-commerce start-up. Each month, subscribers will receive a beautiful Glam Bag with deluxe samples and full-sized beauty products personally catered to you by taking a Beauty Test. Michelle has mastered the art of CGC – consumer generated content – by stimulating and harnessing CGC to best promote her brand. Members can watch and play along with the stylists (fellow YouTube makeup stars) with the same products that arrived in the mail. She has developed ipsy community guidelines outlining what to do, and what not to do on the website. A few guidelines are:
- Be Positive!
- Help your fellow ipsters: advice, tips, and tricks are always appreciated.
- Show us what you got: share your videos, photos, and looks. Share the best content on the web, but also define your own.
The ipsy community encourages users to get involved. It’s self-reinforcing and self-spreading – a recipe for brand success.
