You can’t buy trust. But you can earn it—if you’ve got the right plan. Our Community team can help you establish real connections by linking you with important digital influencers. We’ll then help you develop those relationships into a loyal, engaged network of brand ambassadors.

What is Community?
Our Community group follows a proven, successful process for identifying and engaging digital influencers with our clients’ brands, organizations, and issues.

That process includes:

• Identification: We’ll show you who is talking about you online – and not just anyone. We’ll identify the major influencers, the people who matter to your brand and your online community. And if we don’t already have a relationship with the influencers you need, we’ll establish one.
• Activation: Once SMG identifies your digital infuencers and online communities of interest, we’ll invite them to take action, or give you the tools you need to invite them. We’ll work with you to establish successful, long-lasting relationships. SMG will ensure you position yourself accurately and enticingly, so you’re never overpromising or selling yourself, or your community, short.
• Engagement: SMG will help you connect with the people who matter most to establish dialogue and interaction with your brand and with each other. In partnership with you, SMG develops campaigns that resonate on a personal level where people participate, share, make a contribution, or provide feedback. The SMG approach is to include various established and emerging methods to scale the results of Social Media to attract new community members.
• Community: We help you put the popularity of existing forums, groups, and social networks to work for you. SMG can also create a new Community space where you nurture and develop these important relationships. SMG will help you develop a model and an action plan that makes sense for you.
• Measurement: We give you ongoing summaries of the overall impact of your campaign. These include the hard numbers around the content you’ve created, the relationships you’ve developed, and level of engagement you’ve achieved.

Why build Community?
By their very nature, traditional marketing communications tools and processes fail to take advantage of the new opportunities presented by social media. Instead of involving audiences in a two-way conversation, they simply push information out.

When you actively build an engaged community, you begin a rich dialogue with your customers. This dialogue means transparency to your organization and products, good and bad. This unfiltered and direct feedback has the power to transform when you listen and respond. As you engage you build relationships and trust and, in turn create loyalty that develops ambassadors for your brand and organization.

What makes our approach to Community so good?
Social media gives anyone with an Internet connection the power to connect in a meaningful way with hundreds, thousands, and even millions online. By offering credible person-to-person endorsements (and opposition), today’s digital participants are earning levels of credibility and the trust of their online networks that simply aren’t possible using traditional mass media.

We help you meaningfully engage the right people with your organization by building a consistent, respectful, and ongoing dialogue. With these people on your side, you can gain the kind of insight and influence that literally transforms organizations.

Community case study
Learn more about the real-world impact of Community. 
Read the Ford DSFL case study

Interested in Community?
Find out more about how we can help you build it.
Contact Us