When dealing with crises, one of the most important things to have on your side is a strong community. Highly engaged fans will leap to your defense (assuming that you are not in the wrong or that you have made amends for what you have done wrong).Similarly, when it comes to advocacy, word of mouth marketing and trust for your product, your community is your best advocate. But how do you know whether anyone actually loves your brand?
A strong community visits you often
The first measure of an engaged community is one of the simplest to understand: look inside your web analytics at the returning visitors to your website.
If this number is always low or nonexistent, it means that people are not going back to your website for any reason at all, and this is bad news.You don't just want new audiences - you want people to come back and remain engaged with you, continue to find value in you. What pages people are coming back to visit are important as well.If you have high returning users but it's always to your customer service portal, you may have a service problem rather than an audience affinity.
A strong community engages with you
A second, very simple metric to look at is how many people have engagedwith you on any social channel in the last week. Go to the social media channel of your choice, count the replies that you got, count the favorites/Likes that your content got, count the reshares and retweets.
If there aren't any, then your audience isn't engaged and likely won't be there for you in a crisis.
A strong community drives positive brand sentiment
Finally, do a basic check for sentiment analysis. We acknowledge thatsentiment analysis has some known difficulties and known inaccuracies. If positive sentiment is the lowest out of positive, neutral, and negative; your audience is unlikely to be able or make the effort to effectively defend you in a crisis.
So, how do you fix a community engagement problem? The basic rule of thumb with building a community is: "your attitude determines your altitude." Most companies treat community engagement as an afterthought, something that should be done with minimal investment or commitment. The reality is that building your community requires significant investment - in tools, in people, in time. If you are not willing to invest the skills and time of at least one full-time employee whose job is only in community management, you won't get the kind of loyal audience you need to weather a crisis well.This is also where measuring the ROI of community engagement for crisis communications can be difficult. If you never have a crisis, then you won't necessarily see the crisis communications ROI. Fortunately or unfortunately, every company will eventually have some form of crisis, whether it bea security breach, a bad product or a disgruntled employee. That's when a highly engaged fan base suddenly becomes relevant.Consider this a form of insurance. You buy insurance to protect your business in the event of an emergency, but you try to avoid the emergency to begin with and hope it doesn't happen. The good news is that by investing in community, not only do you help strengthen your ability to weather a crisis, you also get positive benefits without the crisis, such as earned media and influence from your fans.Make your brand's community a strategic imperative, and you'll be better prepared to handle the crises that come along. Measure your progress towards that community with returning visitors, social media engagement, and sentiment analysis. Above all else, invest in your community so that it's there for you when you need it most.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
