Simon Chard discusses the importance of building a community, and the three Es he uses to do so: education, engagement and emotion.
I’m back with episode five of Building a Brand. Today’s topic is all around community. As you can see, I’m in the clinic right now with my team, my community, here, and where I film a lot of my content.
For 2024, community and building communities as part of your social strategy and part of your strategy towards building a brand is going to be the most impactful and important thing that you can do.
Building a community is something that I think we need vitally in the world right now, regardless of building a brand, building a business, or anything of that sort. We’ve never been so connected, and yet we’ve never felt so alone as a society.
So, if you can create a real, genuine community, not only is it going to be good for business, it’s also going to be good for you. And it’s going to be good for society and the greater community as well.
How do we build a community? I take it down to three main pillars, and I call them the three Es: education, engagement, and emotion.
Education
You’re trying to provide value to your listeners, to your viewers, to the people that are reading your content, depending on what medium you’re using. And by adding that value and giving that education, they are going to create a connection with you.
That’s really, really important because they’re going to feel as though you’ve given them something, and they will almost want to give something back to you and they feel very grateful for the education that you provided them with.
Now this education in dentistry can be around a variety of different things. It can be speaking to patients, giving them education on how to look after their oral health, giving them education on what treatment modalities are available for them to solve various dental issues that they might have. But equally, if you’re speaking to dentists, it may be around giving education on how you do dentistry or how you set up your life around dentistry.
There’s a myriad of different ways that you can deliver this content, but it it really needs to come from that place of education.
Engagement
Engagement needs to be bi-directional. If someone communicates with you and contacts you via direct message or comments, you need to engage with that individual to build that relationship. Just like in the real world. If you go to an event, if someone engaged with you and you and you weren’t forthcoming in your engagement back, you wouldn’t build a relationship there.
You need to bring those real world things that we’re so used to into the digital world. So, if someone engages with you, make it your job to give them the best engagement possible, and engage with them in the most honest and helpful way that you can do.
But it also needs to be in the other direction. So, you engaging with other people in your space or in spaces that you want to get into, not only is it going to give you a broader range of connections, both in the real world and in the digital world, but it’s also going to give you an opportunity to be educated in areas where maybe you’re weaker.
Always look at these things, not in a sort of transactional way, but in a way that actually can lead to you building your own personal community and making friends.
Certainly for me through social media, I’ve made many friends who have then moved into the physical world, and I’ve built a relationship with them in person. And that’s the beauty – especially with a small community like dentistry – of putting yourself out there and building that personal brand.
Emotion
All of us as humans, we’re driven by emotion. When we see something that we connect with emotionally, that creates the most strong and long lasting bridge between one person and another. With the beauty of social media, you can do that at scale.
For me, one thing that I found in my own clinical practice to be incredibly powerful is the reaction from a patient when they see their smile for the first time. That’s an example that, shown on social media with the right consent, creates this incredible engagement with you as a brand. Whether that be your practice brand, or you as a personal brand. Look for places where you can show emotion, either from other people or from yourself.
Through radical transparency and honesty, I tried to present myself in the most honest way for myself. And obviously as a human, that means there’s lots of emotion in there as well for me, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but always honest. So, focus on that emotion where you can do.
To summarise, building a community is one of the most important things you can do to build your brand in 2024. And focus on the three Es: education engagement and emotion.
Hopefully that will help you to build a really successful brand for the next year ahead. See you on the next one!
Catch up with Simon’s previous Building a Brand columns:
- When is it the right time to build a brand?
- How to create quality content with the three Ss
- Artist or entrepreneur – choosing the right business pathway
- What does it take to build a brand?
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