Recently a digital leader at a chamber of commerce asked me, how can I engage my members around social media? Can I do more than simply putting on  a training event about digital marketing?

He wanted to know was there a proven way to leverage the power of his membership to spur each other on?

Digital marketing is already seen as a crucial topic for many Chambers of Commerce. A flurry of digital marketing related events for members at the end of last year (e.g. norfolk, devon)  is only set to hot up in 2016.

Developing skills in digital marketing – whether it be SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Social Media, Online advertising or Email marketing – is now a must-do rather than a nice-to-have for local businesses across the country.

But how do we use the power of the crowd to encourage everyone to do more?

We can take a leaf out of Fitbit‘s book and help members track their digital marketing performance, encouraging each other with a sprinkle of competition.

Each week we send each member their Klout score, relative rank versus their peers and the leaderboard, via email. This encourages them to try to improve their digital marketing performance each week.

Most of us don’t have time to track our own analytics properly, and we certainly don’t have the time to generate comparative reports,  so having someone else do it for us is a real God send.

You can set up a program for your chamber very easily using a Rise Power 100 leaderboard. (There is a small cost of around £0.12 / about $0.20 per member per month to run).

Once on Rise:

• get started by signing in with your Twitter account
• create a Power 100 board
• select “add players one by one”
• go to Players and add yourself as the first player (using your twitter account)
• go to Data Collectors and click on “Poll now” to collect a Klout score for you
• go to Releases and click on Create Release to create your first “release” of the leaderboard (this summarises all the collected scores for this week)
• view the released leaderboard
• now share the link to the leaderboard with other members of your chamber and ask them to click on the “Join” button to join the program
• you can then automate it to collect the scores and release the leaderboard each week. You can either send the email out manually (giving you a chance to add some fun commentary) or you can automate the email too.
• for extra impact you can even publicly “Tweet Out” the rank and score to each member

There’s a free 7 day trial so it should give you some time to get it set up before you start paying.

Head over to Rise Power 100 leaderboard and sign up with your Twitter account to get started.

This technique alone will improve your digital marketing performance of every member of your chamber in just a few months.

Did it work for you? Let us know in the comments what other challenges your chamber is facing…