One of my consulting customers said to me the other day:

“Your work just must be so easy – setting everyone up on the major sites and you’re done.”

While I do try to make things less scary and less complicated for the customer, this made me smile. Why? Because if there is any one question in community management and social media that has a clear answer, it is this one:

Can you take a one-size-fits-all approach to your  online business strategy?

No.

Every customer is different, and even customers with similar products or services might have completely different goals. Let’s use an example. Take Gary Vaynerchuk, a very popular online personality. The four ‘friend’ pages he has listed on the front of his website include Corkd, Facebook, Linkedin, and Myspace. Does your community have a presence on Corkd? If you’re in a wine-related travel niche, I hope you said yes.

Even before Twitter dominated the social media party, there was plenty going on online. Remember that old dinosaur, Wikipedia? It still ranks in the top tier for hundreds of keywords – meaning it shows up very often when people search. A search for the word ‘forums’ on Google yields nearly 1.4 million results – think there might be an active forum appropriate for your community?

These are only easy examples.  Creating and managing a community properly requires some thought and strategy to identify a combination of media and technology that is a good balance between time, money, and return on investment. You simply can’t be everywhere, so spend some time and identify where your “ideal customers” hang out. Go hang out there. Contribute, add value, give. You’ll reap the rewards.

Now, about that potential customer. I showed her some of the activity going on with another customer. Then I showed her our plan – they couldn’t have been any more different. She just laughed – quickly realising her silly mistake.

So, are you making that same silly mistake when dealing with your online community?

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How is your online business doing? If you’re not working strategically, why not work with us to build your online business strategy?