When these actions are executed well, the natural result is engagement in the form likes, shares, and comments that serve to build your Facebook community. Questions are the essential calls to action that encourage engagement and community building. When you skillfully ask the right questions, an engaging dialogue among community members readily ensues. Agreement and controversy will both encourage engagement, but when it comes to building a community of fans around your business, keeping everything friendly and upbeat is obviously to your benefit. Don’t do it. MORE >>

An online community takes effort and often time to plan, build, seed and grow. You need to work hard to make sure you get the business objectives right, work out who you are going to engage and how to engage them, and then work with them to seed and grow the community with them. When your online community fails to live up to its promise. That you don’t waste your online community? Here are four ways that we have often seen the opportunities that online communities offer being wasted, and some thoughts on how to avoid suffering the same fate. MORE >>

This is the finding of new research from Forrester. The research , based on a sample of 20,788 (and 63,703 North American) European online consumers, was published by Forrester this week and explores how consumers react to different marketing messages and types of content. Interruptive advertising such as marketing text messages and banner ads perform worst from a trust perspective. The nature of social media is that it is about interaction and that it allows consumers to build their own networks or communities of people with whom they share common interests. MORE >>

Brand advocates — people who share content that results in a new person engaging with a campaign – generate an average of 14 earned media impressions each, according to research released today by Wildfire, the social media marketing software company recently acquired by Google. The data is based on an analysis of 10,000 social marketing campaigns that ran on Facebook over the past 9 months. The types of marketing campaigns that are most entered by users are not the same as the campaigns that are most heavily shared by users. MORE >>

I’m at the Communities 2.0 One of the hot topics raised at the ROI symposium was the thorny issue of getting internal buy in for your online community from across departments and management levels. It’s often the hardest part of getting an online community started and even when you are rolling, how do you keep the visibility of it high to ensure continued investment? m all in favour of piloting, learning and evolving but there can be some pitfalls: you may end up with multiple communities targeting the same people, creating real confusion for your customers. MORE >>