Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

Twitter, as you all know, is a place where many customers express their ideas, issues around a
brand or service. Many companies are heavily investing in a Twitter strategy around support and marketing. What if instead of having 20 full-time employees answering tweets, if you had your community brand advocates do that on your company's behalf? Giving them special priviliges to interact with other customers on Twitter via the community would be beneficial in 2 major ways:

• Reduce your support costs as your super users engage and promote your brand on your behalf
• Enable direct communication between your customers on Twitter and your brand experts on the community. When product suggestions come directly from customer experts (super-users)  it is far more powerful than an employee recommending a service or product.

Now comes the interesting question I have been waiting to ask. Do you know if any of your super users are also active on Twitter? If they are, do you follow them and know what they are usually upto? 

[#2]

Our community is, on average, demographically a bit older and probably somewhat more technophobic than most others - and I think most of our users didn't really know what Twitter was until we started using it ourselves and put up our twitter feed on the side of the boards.  However, once we did, some of our moderators picked up on it and started tweeting themselves and from there, several of our users got into it as well.  I think its attracted a fair number of new people to certain areas of our community which is great.  Of course there is always the odd curmudgeon who reacts with the predictable "I don't go in for Twitter or Facebook or any of these fancy new social sites!" - but for the most part I think a lot of our users are getting into it.  Since we are not primaly a support community, more of a literary discussion community, we don't exactly have "superusers" in the traditional sense of the term but I've certainly seen some of our members promoting discussions in our community on Twitter which great to see.

[#3]

No idea, but I think I'll ask.  I kind of doubt it, but I'm looking for any and all ideas on how to build a better relationship with my superusers, b/c I feel like our "hold" on them is tenuous at best.

[#4]

definitely on Twitter both from the personal brand perspective and the corporate brand. Your ideas for making our Twitter users who aren't members feel like that are being listened and answered to via our community would be awesome. Look forward to hearing more about this. Happy to help out in brainstorming and testing any ideas. 

-Randy