252: The power of community with best-selling author, Mark Schaefer

Let's face it ...

It's pretty damn tough running a business today, getting your name out there and connecting with clients and customers, and the people who influence them - especially if you lack a sizeable budget to do so.

Traditional advertising is rarely effective these days and is out of reach for most small business owners anyway, while many default digital marketing tactics no longer seem to work as well as they used to.

But there is a way through for those entrepreneurs who are willing to explore some new ideas while at the same time be respectful as to how they show up in the marketplace.

At the Reputation Revolution, we're all about building a sustainable base of communications for our professional personal brand which, for many of us, also adds considerable weight to the overall marketing of our businesses. In many cases, we ARE the business.

We look at strategic PR and communications and all that entails, including content creation for our owned media channels, we cover social media of course, as well as earned media such as publicity, media relations, influencer relations and public speaking.

Growing an audience of followers and subscribers is all part of the program: an audience of fans and allies, champions of our personal brand, of what it is we do and stand for - an audience made up of potential advocates, influencers, clients and customers.

But can we go deeper, and build a genuine community around our ideas, or a specific topic or issue?

Community as a concept has been kicking around for a while now, but it's taken on new significance in recent times, for many of the aforementioned reasons.

At best, it's grossly misunderstood, at worst, it's been consigned to the bin of marketing buzzwords!.

But we're about to change that in this episode!

Today's expert guest gives us the rundown on communities from a strategic marketing standpoint.

Indeed, he's just released a book on the topic!

His name is Mark Schaefer, and the book is called BELONGING TO THE BRAND: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.

Mark is one of the world's leading marketing futurists and keynote speakers; he's also a best-selling author, a veteran blogger and podcaster, a business consultant and educator of note.

He's a true thought leader, in a world where there are plenty of wannabe's - and he embodies all the things we talk about here on the Reputation Revolution.

Let's meet him, shall we?