6. Community

1.Reaching an audience and building a community is totally different. For example, if you are selling a printer door to door in some apartment building, you are reaching hundreds of individual audience, but not a market. Because people in the same apartment building they don’t chat with others in the same building about how good is a printer they bought recently. A market should be like a community, where you have people of same interest and more importantly, they will share their points of view with one another on the products. This is why nowadays marketers are struggling to build a community.

2.The appearance of social media is a gift to all marketers because they finally find the fastest, most effective and most convenient way to build a community. Before the appearance of social media, communities are initially based on networks. This means firstly you got to have people who know each other in real life, then they share the same interest. Network is essential in the old community building process. However, social media changes the rule. On the Internet, you can join community where you know no one in it. This is revolutionary. It skips the first step of building a community offline, people don’t have to know each other at the first place.

3.No one wants to be sold stuff via their social network. It can be explained also through the community building theory. Social medias like Facebook is based on social network. You know each other on it. So it’s more like the offline community that I mentioned,except that this is not really a community because you don’t share the same interest with the people who wants to sell you things through it.

4.Some thoughts about Snapchat: although it’s a great heat now and it’s going to IPO soon. But I don’t really think highly of it. Because I really don’t see if it’s better that we lose every record between our friends and us. Articles will always praise something when it’s a heat and criticize on it when it fail. We should still be objective and see where Sanpchat will go in the future.