Tim McMullen Founder, President and Executive Creative Director, redpepper

How to Build an Online Community that Engages Core Customers to Recruit New Customers (and Connect Social Media Metrics to the Bottom Line)

Description: By now, most brands are aware of social media's potential to activate a community of enthusiastically engaged customers, but just because you build it, doesn't mean they'll come. Seventy-five percent of community sites never break 1,000 members. So, how do you know - before you even start building your online community platform - whether the launch of your online community site will be successful? And how do you define success? Tim will share redpepper's real-world lessons and experience in launching and building an active online community for Kirkland's, a national home decor retailer. His presentation will describe how redpepper and Kirkland’s painted a picture of what a successful online community would look like and then brought it to life. The MyKirklands.com online community was launched in July 2009 and currently has more than 80,000 members. MyKirklands.com is an inspiring case study in how to engage your core customers and inspire them to help find new customers for your brand. Inviting the Kirkland’s fans to be co-creators of the community gave them a sense of partnership with the brand and ownership of the community. It was also important to establish benchmarks and checkbacks early in the development process that can be used to measure success as the community is launched and continues to grow. redpepper has created a measurement system that goes beyond counting clicks and numbers of members. Through our measurement dashboard, we show how to track social media metrics and meaningful customer behaviors that connect to the business goals of the brand.