Engage with a community

Every brand has a community.

Whether you like it or not - people are talking about your brand. The aim as a marketer is to make sure the conversations people have are positive, promotional. One disapointed customer is worth 12 good ones.

But finding and engaging a community is hard. A lot of brands think that creating their own social network from scratch and inviting people in is easy. It isn’t. This is extremely tough to do, even for top-tier consumer brands.

Instead, it’s better to leverage the current social networks that have formed organically around brands. Find a network that has aggregated an audience that makes sense for your brand, and roll your own social networking destination within a MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, or something similar.

If you’re really determined to do something on your own, try a tool like Ning for an inexpensive, easy way to create something uniquely yours.