Online Community Meetup Recap: Building Super Fans

The June edition of the monthly Online Community Meetup in San Francisco featured Nathan McGee, community manager at Zynga. McGee’s talk, Building Super Fans! Taking Your Community to the Next Level examined the importance of super fans for organizations and how to cultivate them.

What's a Super Fan and Why Do You Need Them?

McGee began his discussion by talking about why organizations need super fans. Simply put, "super fans" demonstrate a particular brand of loyalty that, once recognized, stands to benefit your organization tremendously. Super fans are those individuals who are engaged with your organization above and beyond your average supporter.

Your super fans’ personal investment in your organization means they can be counted on to provide honest feedback. And whether that feedback is what you hope to hear or not, it is constructive because it comes from someone who cares about the organization, its future, and its community.

Super fans are great ambassadors for building awareness of what you and your organization do because outsiders are likely to consider them reliable third-party advocates. Super fans are also valuable because they are more inclined to give of their time and money to benefit your organization and its mission.

How to Cultivate Super Fans

Super fans, however, are not born naturally and must be cultivated. McGee lays out five steps to creating super fans:

1. Create interest
2. Engage
3. Introduce
4. Give responsibility
5. Give them tools

The first two steps, “create interest” and “engage,” are ones that most organizations understand and undertake. However, it is with the remaining steps that organizations fail and lose out on the chance to nurture super fans.

McGee explained that “introduction” means finding ways to connect members of your community to one another based on common interests. “Give responsibility” means encouraging fans to organize meetups, chats, fan clubs, or other activities. When you “give them tools,” provide your fans with clear instructions if you’re asking them to undertake a task. “Tools” also refers to exclusive access and VIP treatment generally reserved for fans of their status. The means by which to do this need not be expensive and can be as simple as a note of appreciation, birthday message, or some sort of swag.

Create Community

Before you can nurture super fans, you have to create a community around your organization; one way to think of this is process is to think of building a cultural group. Tactics for doing this include: developing a nickname for your group or individual members, using identifiable symbols, employing lingo, or setting a common goal for members.

Community members need to feel that they belong to something too and are welcome members of the group. In addition, keep in mind that everyone in your community can contribute something and giving them the opportunity to share is powerful.

Finally, remember to be transparent with your community about what you expect from them and what they should expect from you, including owning up to mistakes you make. Building a community that maintains and creates super fans is an ongoing process and one that, if done properly, will benefit your organization for a long time to come. 

Photo: Mai Le