What are you doing about your accidental community?

Because they’re not clustered in nice fat groups claiming a proud central space in the garden, they’re not complimented by neighbors of other carefully-groomed organic matter. They’re insubstantial, really.

These wild communities may be lone, thriving on a long-thought-dead channel with small membership numbers. It may be easy to discount the discovery of a wild community as unintentional, lacking organization (and brand stamp) and therefore, insignificant. Something that stubbornly survived the winter unprotected. But to discount the accidental community is to presume it has little merit. Unimportant. Incapable of rising tall and casting a long shadow.

That would be a mistake. If the long tail is a worthwhile SEO investment, would it not bear the same fruit for a brand community? Some companies think so, helping others walk the fringe of their community gardens to discover untapped possibilities. Information can flower into knowledge, and knowledge is power.

I get it. Budgets are tight, revenue is down and resources are scarce. Outliers, while duly noted, are the least of your worries.

That is, unless there are holes in your operations and you’re deaf to customer feedback about broken old processes. Unless your service delivery people aren’t inspired to own each customer’s happiness, one call or tweet at a time. Unless you prefer 1x customers over those with strong LTV potential for your brand. In these instances, you better believe even the outliers matter because small can multiply.

Are you looking outside your carefully tilled, fertilized, and weeded patch of Facebook (or Twitter, or G+) ground for your brand’s accidental communities? What do you do when you find them?

Image courtesy of  Horia Varlan.