Creating online communities: the journey doesn’t stop there

Posted by: Alex Erasmus

Working in PR, marketing, advertising etc, we need to pull ourselves back from situations and realise that we don’t all spend the entire day behind a computer screen engaging with Social Media.

We should always, at the very least, ask how the offline is being influenced by the online. Jeremiah Owyang recently alluded to this in a post on his Web Strategy blog.  If we don’t, then we can end up with a campaign overflowing with clever ideas that create dynamic online communities, but build limited relevance for the company in question and, as a result, limited revenue and ROI.

It’s easy to get excited about fun online marketing ideas and we certainly want to continue the trend towards talking to customers, rather than at them, but we must see the bigger picture and remember the connection between online and offline.

Leading someone to follow your  brand on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook or visit a micro-site you’ve set up for a specific campaign doesn’t mean the end of the road. There needs to be something interesting for people to feel like the journey was worth it. This is why content is key.