I've been talking today with a company about expanding its use of social networking. They are a Newcastle based music retailer who are interested in creating an online community where customers, their staff and the makers of their products can get together and talk about music, review products, get technical support, hear about events, etc, building a relationship between themselves and their customers. At the end of the day they want to maintain and build their business but the way they want to do this is to by improving their customer experience and put something back into the local music scene.

A lot of the ideas they have are good, using twitter for technical support, offering webspace for bands recruiting members, advertising gigs, promoting offers. Currently though, they lack the online customer base to make what will be a substational amount of work worthwhile doing. They have around 100 facebook fans and about half that on Twitter. Our article Improving Social Networking Signup covers a lot of what they need to be doing to fix this. My personal feeling is that, in order to get a head of steam growing which will hopefully feedback on itself, it is the incentive method of signup that will have to be followed. Offering their customers something in return for them signing up to Facebook or Twitter is the only way to kickstart their campaign.

What this incentive is to be and how to advertise it what we have to work out next...