Question

. What strategies (of Lopez's) have you used or seen used to build community in a group? How might this process differ in a large organization versus a small group?

Answer 1

Jen Lopez created an online community in order to build a stronger marketing strategy to increase the traffic inwards (customer increase). Lopez states that creating online community is essential as it acts as the base for sharing news about your products and services and to have effective marketing efforts. Some of the strategies that was used by Lopez are community and content, community and key word research, link building in community, etc. However, the ones that I used are:

- Identifying the target community group. For example, I targeted the online community group to market my products (herbal beauty care products).

- Community and content- these go hand-in-hand. I used the same content that was used by the community such as blogs, product reviews and comments.

- Key word research in community- this helped me to analyze and understand what the audience or community is searching for. I used keywords that were used in Twitter and the hashtags. For example, -herbalbeauty

-Email and community- I found email communication the best way to share about the products to the community. The emails were personalized to suit their needs and it started to receive more acceptances and I received more responses.

This strategy to build an online community differs in a large organization versus a small group. This is because as the size of the organization increases so does the community’s size. Since the community group size increases, it is important for the organization to monitor and lead its brand. This requires standard operating procedures as well. Whereas in small organizations, this is not required. The community size is small and hence the monitoring and supervision function is not required as in large networks. Since large organizations have diversity, the communication would not be effective for such communities because of their different values and beliefs. It is difficult to reach to a consensus.