Whenever I explain LeadGenerators’ concept of ‘Passion Groups’ and “Passion Community Building”, I find myself talking about the exciting online communities that I have helped to create, build and run as part of our Social Media work for our clients. 

At this point, the client usually looks at me with false knowledge in his eyes and speaks those immortal but not unique words  ‘Those companies have a natural passion that can create a community, my company sells [insert non-sexy product]  - how am I to make people passionate about [insert same non-sexy product]?

This is a good and legitimate question, and the marketing manager usually believes he has me stumped. 

Problem is I have an answer for him:

‘You need to step away from the product and look at why people are buying your product and who are buying your product and then find something that appeals to them.’

To demonstrate this idea I turn to the wonderful Fiskateers and their brilliant community.  The Fiskateers are a passion group belonging to Fiskars, a company that produces a range of scissors, cutters and clippers for home and for the garden.  Not the most exciting of products and one can be forgiven for thinking that one cannot build a passion around scissors.

MaryMotherOfTwo Mary Scothern
Just bought a pair of scissors from @scissorsRus – yeah!

scissorsRus Scissor Company
Thanks @MaryMotherOfTwo : )

CutUpThings Rachel Leery
Just used my scissors to cut a package open – thanks @scissorsRus

scissorsRus Scissor Company
@CutUpThings – yeah!

Riveting isn’t it?  I can barely contain my passion to join this community.

But Fiskars thought outside of the box (or rather beyond the blade) and looked at how people were actually using their products.  It turned out to be a large number of crafters – people who make anything from decorating photo albums, quilting, card making and jewellery making.  These people are just crazy for crafts and creating things with their hands is their passion.  They also are very social, with many of them belonging to both online and local craft groups and others involved with teaching arts and crafts to others.  This means that many of them are already part of other groups and communities and, if Fiskars plugged into their passion, they could turn out to be very effective brand advocates.

Basically this was a beautiful readymade community just waiting for a vision, and Fiskars saw it.

So they decided to build a community of crafts people.  They called the community “Fiskateers - Crafting Ambassadors” and their first call of action was to find the four ‘Lead Fiskateers’.  These four crafting paragons would be recruited from their own customers to build, lead and drive the online communities for Fiskars and to take over the running of the community and ‘do all the work!’  These positions were paid part time jobs (20 hours a week) – but as these ladies were required to organise events, meet ups and travel across the country to spearhead this campaign; this was the only reasonable way to compensate for the costs involved in this activity. The fact that they were paid was never hidden from the customers.

This idea of the customer ‘doing all the work’ is something that our social media clients here at LeadGenerators will be all too familiar with – something that we consider the backbone and core ingredient  to the building of any successful online passion community. 

Getting back to the story……The 4 lead Fiskateers that they found were Cheryl, Angela Tami and Rebecca. 

As you can see, these four customers have completely taken over the community and run everything:  They produce content for the blog, upload images, engage with community members, request and manage content and blog posts from other Fiskateers.  They even organise the ongoing offline events and meetups in their respective areas and help other members to do the same.  They are the established leaders of the Friskateers and it is evident that they are perceived by members as such.


Launching in 2006, they wanted to have 200 members by the end of the year – well they managed to get 200, actually the number was somewhere closer to 2000! They now have 6000+ spanning 70 countries. Their gallery gets an average of 1700 uploads per month, with over 11,000 comments. There has been a 600% increase in online mentions with an overall return on value somewhere in the region of 500%.  The Fab Four also create their own PR and marketing campaigns and propose new product ideas for the company, based on their dealings with the members of the community,

And they do it because this is their passion! 
And they are very effective!
Why?  Because they care about crafting!

If you think about it, groups such as the Fiskateers are proof  that even the most “boring” products can take advantage of social media to build passion groups where members do all the work to spread the word of your brand and your products.

So here is my challenge to all of you reading this post. 

Find out what passions your customers share.  Find your own customers who are involved with those passions and find a way of recruiting them to engage in their passion and to help them build an active community around that passion in your branded back yard.  But remember at all times, these people do it for love – not love of your product, but love of their passion.  If you can help them with that, you will certainly win in the process.