Last month, as I was listening to a webinar about the recently-published 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, I tweeted this top-level finding: “Getting people to engage and participate” is one of the biggest obstacles to building successful online communities.

David Parmet quickly responded with this observation: “I hate when these ideas are framed so that it’s the customers who should engage and participate. What about the companies?” [emphasis mine]

This felt like a blog post in the making, so I asked David to expand on his tweet. He willingly obliged, and his guest post is below.

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By David Parmet

Engagement is a two-way street. Unfortunately, very few marketers (and the bloggers who write about marketing) ever think about it from the “consumer” point of view.

We imagine (hopefully) that there is the amorphous blob of people out there on the Wild Web just waiting for a chance to “engage with their favorite brands”–a phrase I heard at a recent marketing conference. We convince ourselves that our customers are out there–captive to our every word–and just by the fact that we “engage” with them via social media, we have credibility and are “speaking with a human voice.”

I frequently cite a quote from a Kevin Smith movie to explain this phenomenon. To paraphrase: “The Internet is a world-wide communications platform where people from all over the world gather to trade pornography and bitch about movies.”

Even if you add “curse the management of their favorite team,” “look for news about Jon and Kate,” and “look up how much they’ve lost in the stock market,” there’s very little space there for “engage with their favorite brands” or “hang out on our Facebook Page.”

‘Misplaced assumptions’ about communities

To imagine there’s a “community” out there waiting on the Internet for your brand to come along and “engage” with it is not only wrong, it’s a recipe for marketing disaster. Most of the social media marketing disasters come about from incorrect assumptions and misplaced expectations about the ways that online communities grow and prosper–with the belief that by opening their Facebook Page or Twitter account, the world will beat a path to their door.

The truth, as it always is, is far more complex.

Out there on the Internet is a whole universe of consumers, users, customers, and people who may or may not care about your brand, might have a problem they want solved, or just might not care. This is just the case as it is in the larger, offline world.

New recipe for success

The companies that will succeed in this new world will be the ones that understand that customer engagement happens in many ways and on many platforms. It might be on Twitter or Facebook, or it might happen on a telephone call to customer support. And in many cases, your customers just might want to be left alone to do with your product or service as they want.

Be a responsive partner, and don’t rely on gimmicks and the latest hot tools to come along to present yourself to your customers. And remember, they are the ones keeping you in the black, so listen to what they are saying or not saying.

David Parmet is a social media and communications consultant. He blogs at Marketing Begins at Home.

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