Isabel Walcott Draves

Community Top Ten List

Communispace, a client of mine that helps corporations develop closer relationships with their customers through online communities, has released a top ten list with some great tips.  I'll reproduce them here because they deserve reproducing, and then of course I'll add my own commentary because, after all, this is my blog.

1. "Invite the right people."  You bet.  Exclusivity is extremely important to social networking, and it's really been undervalued.
2. "View members as advisors." Absolutely.  Too many executives think they're driving the ship, when really, their customers should be at the helm.
3. "Find the social glue."  This one is harder to understand, but what they mean is you need to treat your online conversations like real conversations.  If you talked about yourself the whole time, people wouldn't like you very much, and the same is true online. 
4. "Work at building the community."  Like a good hostess, experienced community facilitators know how to give people reasons to strike up a conversation and making people feel comfortable.
5. "Be genuine."  Communities won't work without trust and honesty; people pointed and laughed at McDonald's blog when Bob Langert pretended the Happy-Meal Hummers were "Just toys, not vehicle recommendations", even though they were part of a promotion paid for by the advertiser.
6. "Just plain ask." Important, although I would have broadened it a bit. It's part of just having a normal conversation and not getting all uptight about "messaging" and "positioning".
7. "Listen more than ask."  This is kind of part of 2 and 3.  What the community thinks is important is likely to be more important than what the marketers think is important.
8. "Don't squelch the negative."  This is SO important!  Lots of companies still think that if they try to hide it, it will go away.  We see how effective that's been with clerical abuse of minors and Mark Foley's instant messages.  Cover-ups don't work anymore now that we have the Internet, folks.
9. "Don't ask too much too often."  Yep.  There's a limit to how much busy people can pay attention to you and your needs.
10. "Keep experimenting."  This might be the most important one of the bunch.  There's no innovation without experimentation.  New techniques are disruptive -- and expensive -- but they keep you on your toes and they keep you competitive.

Fine-Tuning Audience Development

Let's play Rate the Audience Development Initiatives!

Family Circle's current partnership with EBay looks cool - win $2000 to spend on Ebay to redesign a small space in your home.  Upload a photograph of your space and an essay about your plan to win.    Smart partnering for both sides, good user-generated content.  The prize, while not spectacular (toss in access to someone cool?), is compelling enough to do the trick.  They've created an incentive to come back at least once to see who won.  Score: 8

I was reading Glamour on the beach this weekend, and they are starting some new user-generated content stuff that looks cool (in theory - we'll see about execution).  They're doing some kind of blog, and asking readers to submit photos taken on the street of fashion Do's and Don't's.  Everyone who uploads a photo is eligible to win a $2000 shopping spree with a Glamour editor.  The prize that includes not just the money but the access to "an individual of note" is a great touch.

It's a great way to increase participation.  I love the user-generated theme, which inspires multiple visits and submissions.  It seems a shame, however, that they have missed the opportunity to work with another site that could share or swap traffic, like Bloomingdale's for shopping; Flickr for pictures; or Nokia's cameraphone marketing department.  The result is that not only have they missed out on a cool opportunity to generate new traffic, but they don't have enough submissions to show good user-generated content. They're showing pictures of people's babies.  Personally, I would recommend not putting user-generated content up until you have accumulated enough to display something good.  Score: 6

In contrast to these user-driven content contests, InStyle's partnership with BlueFly where you click an animated image and they call it "playing a game" seems like a wasted opportunity.  Demanding that you start by giving them all your contact information before you know what the "game" even is will ensure they have light uptake.  Then, the game itself involves no skill and isn't worth practicing to improve your chances of winning.  Finally, there's no link to entice you to click back to InStyle's website if you navigated to the sweepstakes through Bluefly.  There's a place where you can subscribe though... Old Media is not likely to forget their original business model, even when it's starting to let them down.  Score: 2

Users are just much more likely to come back to see if their picture was posted, than to come back to "play again".  A user-generated content sweepstakes takes advantage of Many-to-Many, the way this interactive display does not.

Audience Development is Interdisciplinary

I've been looking at Audience Development opportunities lately.  It's good to know that websites have begun to recognize that this is different from marketing, and that it doesn't just happen on its own.  Historically, Audience Development has been a sticky problem (yes, pun intended) for online properties. 

To begin with, the "If you build it, they will come" philosophy of the mid nineties is sadly still alive and well.

Then, large portions of the online industry still don't know what to call the people who come to their website.  The words favored by traditional media folks practically have failure built into them: "audience", "readers", and "eyeballs" all imply a broadcast mentality where the company talks and everyone else listens.  Words like "users" or "traffic" are a better fit -- although some complain about the drug connotations.  If you understand how to leverage the Internet's revolutionary ability to create Many-to-Many conversations you probably prefer words like "members" or "community".

Of course, if I say I'm interested in community development positions, I'll be invited to build latrines in the third world.  So Audience Development it is.

Some folks limit Audience Development to Search Engine Marketing.  But business development and interactive initiatives that result in lots of links, new visitors, and longer usage sessions generate participation -- while having the secondary effect of bosting search rankings.  When people ask me to define what Audience Development means to me, I say it's:

- 40% Biz Dev (partnerships that drive traffic, offer cool prizes/content/interactive, or both)

- 40% Features (user-generated content that keeps people coming back and spawns word of mouth, or real interactive features)

-20% Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (navigating your way to the top of search engine listings)

Of course, this explanation doesn't even cover what I consider standard operating procedure for all online initiatives: pefecting your navigation and usability, watching your traffic stats to spot what stories or products work best, offering more like that, promoting your features on your own site, creating an appropriate look and feel, talking to the press, and so forth.  I think of that basic website marketing as Version 1.0.  And if you feel like buying some ads to drive traffic to your site, feel free.

My sense is that most websites hit a number of these efforts, and miss others. For example, there are sites that put big budgets into their look and feel, and do their sweepstakes, while forgetting navigability.  Or, companies that got started offline simply "broadcast" on their websites, missing out on the Many-to-Many functionality that enablestheir competitors.  Then, you have the sites that look and work beautifully but don't even show up on the first Google page under their own keywords, because nobody ever bothered with SEO.

The biggest problem with Audience Development is how interdisciplinary it is.  It's:

• the editor's job to commission good content
• the product development manager's job to think of sticky interactive ideas
• the market research director's job to define the audience demographic
• the user interface designer's job to create efficient navigation
• the graphic designer's job to make the site look appealing
• the business development manager's job to put together partnerships
• the web marketing manager's job to run sweepstakes and ad campaigns
• the PR person's job to get press...

Even things like the the privacy policy (corporate counsel) and page downloading speed (engineers and sys admins) come into play.  As each piece of the puzzle settles smoothly into place, members will be more likely to visit, linger, and return.  So, successful Audience Development means knowing how to work with and coordinate efforts from all these different fronts, without the luxury of having any of them be direct reports.

Every website's main goal is maximizing revenues.  While this can't happen without maximizing audience development, the actual customer is often someone else, like the advertiser.  In many cases, while there is one main person thinking about how to maximize revenues across the board (the CEO), there is no one main person thinking about how to best meet the needs of the site's community. 

These needs are met by so many diverse staff members, each with a different agenda.  It can be hard for all the different members of the team to coordinate.  Therefore, you see spotty successes more often than one unified effort.  I'll give some examples in my next post.