Software Community Managers: How Do You Know Your Best Customers?

Josh Bernoff has a great post over at the Forrester Groundswell blog:

“Here’s a conversation I often have with marketers:

Josh: Who are your best customers?

Marketer: Women with a child under 4. [Or 'People with assets of at least $1 million.' Or some such.]

Josh: No, I really mean ‘Who are your best customers?’ What are their names?

Marketer: [No response.]

If you’re seeking word of mouth, you should know who your best customers are . . . by name.”

I agree with this 120%.

Your community is not demographics, it’s not numbers, it’s not users (god I hate that word). It’s people.

That said, while attending the (thoroughly excellent) Good Ideas Salon Community Management Panel at YouTube I realized that I am in a much different situation than those managing social networking communities. Or even shopkeeper communities like Matt Stinchcomb of Etsy.

I don’t hang out where my community talks about things that they are passionate. They use the Flock software by themselves, and I meet them primarily when they have an issue (or occasionally give us praise). How can I get to know these people?

Josh mentions that “there is no one more enthusiastic than a friend who used to hate you”, which I’ll second wholeheartedly. But I still don’t know much about that person/those people aside from the fact that they use Flock. I don’t get to know them through their social interactions like Jen Burton of Digg gets to.

Which is not to say I don’t meet great people…I just don’t get to know them the same way.  So help me out, folks…what do you do?

Software Community Managers, speak up: how do you really get to know your community?