Tag Archives: Marketing

Top three lessons from online communities

I’ve seen, first hand, the challenges faced when trying to get a group of people together on the internet. I’m a member of a of a number of online communities. I’ve also helped found a few communities. They include:

9rules – a group I really wanted to become a part of, the best of the best content
yopos – something noah and I tried to start (coming again soon!): young professionals
Twenty Somethings – a group of attractive, witty, smart bloggers all in their twenties
Employee Evolution – smart professionals guest blogging about work, life, entrepreneurship
Brazen Careerist – the natural extension of EE, network of existing and new bloggers about the above
BarCamp/New Tech – online and offline, meetup with some local nerds
SXSW/CommunityNext – organized events/conferences around a community
AKPsi – offline, but 50+ college students with an interest in business (VP/President)
Two other college clubs – again, offline but a good look at how people interact

And I’ve done tons of observation of popular online groups (FlyerTalk, Zen Habits, Get Rich Slowly, I Will Teach You To Be Rich). Here are my top three lessons learned.

Existing community must already be strong

When I say strong you need to have an extreme amount of quality or quantity. A little of each will not be sufficient.

Employee Evolution and 9rules attracted people because of the high quality–they both grew very quickly. On the other hand, yopos sought out to do the same and, I admit, consistent quality wasn’t there (and we didn’t have the numbers either).

In college, AKPsi was one of the largest groups in the business school (100+) and because of that it kept attracting more and more people (network effect). Once our numbers started to drop off we had to quickly focus on quality or else we’d get stuck in mediocrity. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. We had generations of mediocrity in the group, as the numbers diminished even they left. By the end of my college career the group dropped to a quarter of it’s original size. The same happened with two other groups–when the strength dwindled, the community failed.

Without the quality or quantity it’s very hard to do anything. You could take five very talented people and create something amazing. If you have 100 people, odds are you will find some great, active, and interesting people worth sticking around for.

People always talk about meeting up, rarely do

It must be how we are hard-wired as humans, but no matter what your group is–people will want to meet in person. People will try to organize and coordinate these events but they rarely happen. Even in college, where we met as a group every week, it was challenging to have people commit to anything outside of something we’ve already structured for them.

Lucky for the internet there are groups like the SXSW coordinators who will put on an event for everyone to go to. But even with 9rules we never saw any official “get togethers” no matter how often it was brought up. I’ve seen the same start over at Brazen Careerist and I question what will come from the discussions (I have a good idea, though: nothing).

Some obvious exceptions to the rule are groups like BarCamp. These still usually require a big investment from one or two people (and that’s it). If you want something to happen you have to take the initiative yourself at first. Then, make sure you have the strong community to help in the future (see previous point). People usually need to see value first.

Now, the inverse of this is also true: people love to participate a lot in the beginning. Say you open up a forum: people will chat about anything and everything they think of on day one. By day ten they have less to talk about, less to reply to. The challenge here, depending on your group, is maintaining participation and having people come back (quality and quantity help).

There are key participants, focus on them

No matter where you go, one will notice the “key” players. Especially in a discussion environment like a forum. Within five minutes of surfing FlyerTalk it was clear who knew what they were talking about and was respected by the group. When I started yopos there were a few guys who were very eager and I didn’t have them time to focus on them and empower them to help with the community. Lesson learned.

CommunityNext had a ton of people show up and a lot of it was due to key figures. Get them involved, get them in your group and make sure people know about them. One of my favorite stories was watching Hiten Shah try to fix the wireless network at Stanford. People noticed him working on it and one or two people stopped and offered to help.

What about you? Do you agree or disagree? Have you learned anything worth sharing?

PS: I’ve been working on updating and consistent-ifying my look. Click through to devin reams and let me know what you think. Oh, and be sure to tell your friends about my services.

Community Next Rundown

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I had a blast last weekend in San Francisco. My buddy Noah (and Adam) hosted the second Community Next conference. Luckily I was invited. I’ve put some photos online and my quick thoughts are found below.

VIP Dinner

Friday was the VIP Dinner. I chatted with a bunch of awesome guys including the CTO of Pandora Tom Conrad, Shel Israel, Eric from icanhascheezburger, the MyBlogLog team, the Scrapblog team, Dave McClure, Andrew Chen, and so on.

Pre-Party

Then we hit the pre-party at Old Pro (in Palo Alto). It was a ton of fun (and sponsored by Yahoo! again). I hung out with great folks including the aforementioned plus Poornima from Mint, Shivani from Women2.0, Gabe from Techmeme, and so on and so forth. I was humbled all evening. I also had the pleasure of hanging out with Andre Nosalsky, Scott Hurff and Rob Johnson. They happened to be my roommates for the evening. Thats a story in and of itself.

The Conference

The next morning the conference was at the PlugandPlayTechCenter which was an excellent spot for the conference. It went by a lot faster than the last one. Perhaps that’s because I could actually sit and enjoy it. Which I did. I heard some cool people speak about an awesome area right now: viral marketing. We heard from employee number four at MySpace, icanhascheezburger, hi5, Pownce, Justin.tv, Crazy Egg, Timothy Ferriss, and so on. A lot of Facebook discussion and plenty on what you should and should not do to attract and retain users.

Bottom Line

Another great conference. I enjoyed chatting with everyone there and am still excited by the caliber of the attendees. Like I said, I was lucky to be there. The Community Next conferences have been phenomenal and I look forward to the future (yes, there will be more!).

What’s in a name?

Community Next: Viral Marketing

Lunch at Sonic

An Open Letter to Google

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Dear Google,

What have you done lately to

SUCKE(RED)

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I hate the (RED) campaign and everyone associated with it (both the consumers and the companies advocating it). Josh Spear has posted a neat little news clip about it. CNN says:

It has cost $100M to market the campaign while only raising $18M for charity.

No kidding? Get people to “give” more by spending more on themselves? Sigh.

Bloggers make money?

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How dare they! It’s true though. We all know the blogosphere is not just used to talk about our cats and day at the mall. Blogs are great ways to communicate. Executives can publish one post and have the entire world up-to-date, companies can talk to its current and potential customers, people can share their ideas and stories with friends and strangers alike. Blogs are powerful and extremely functional–people are catching on.

So, why can’t some bloggers make money? A lot of people are full-time bloggers (they may prefer to be called journalists, or writers though). Sure, we can drop a few ad links on your website and make a few bucks a day. Does that really compliment what we’re doing? Hardly. Just like television commercials ineffectiveness: they don’t compliment the medium nor the content. Relevance is important and a few sites have found a way to solve that problem for bloggers.

I’ll only venture forward by stating this post is sponsored by ReviewMe. I agreed to see what this crazy idea could offer me. A few dollars to talk about a website and review it? Don’t I do that anyway? Yes. Should I get paid for it? Why not? Sure, my wisdom and commentary are invaluable but I’m willing to negotiate a price…

Oh, you’re convinced I’m not trustworthy anymore, right? I get paid so I’m no longer impartial? I understand you can’t help but be skeptical as to what I say but that’s nonsense. For starters, ReviewMe doesn’t allow advertisers to mandate positive reviews. In other words, it’s the author’s discretion as to which way their review will lean. Mike likens sites like ReviewMe to PR firms. I think this is a pretty accurate analogy. As I said, I’m the kind of guy who is going to look at sites and give my honest opinion either way. ReviewMe simply facilitates the exchange between advertisers willing to be judged and the bloggers willing to talk about products and services. I hope it can attract the services of some interesting new sites. Obviously, I wouldn’t talk about irrelevant material here so there’s truly no impact on the reader.

So, with that said I’d recommend ReviewMe to anyone. The site’s interface is straight-forward and easy to manage. I had no problem signing up and getting my first review started. Will it be effective in generating honest ‘buzz’ and advertising? I have no way to tell but I do realize that money introduces a new level of motivation. There’s no doubt this will have an interest effect on blogs everywhere.

Miss Dewey Sucks

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I want to talk about marketing production quality and how Miss Dewey lacks it. If you haven’t seen this site yet, it’s basically a search engine with a saucy librarian standing there being snarky and clever on occasion. If you don’t get around to typing in a search she’ll try to get your attention.

Quite annoying, really.

Does this novelty attract anyone? Sure. For the first visit. Do people come back again and again? No effing way.

Why not?

Humor works sparingly

Humor, as a marketing tool, gets old very quickly. Some people can execute humor extremely well. They end up making Miller Lite Commercials. But, do you see the same funny commercial more than once or twice during a football game? No way. The humor wears off and people become annoyed. Think of the Superbowl Commercials that get reused dozens of times for weeks after the game. You start to hate them pretty quickly.

The same goes for Dewey. She’ll grab a lot of quick attention but there’s no reason for me to go back and hear the same five witticisms on loop.

Quality over novelty

Here’s a fun bonus: turn up your volume when she begins talking and listen closely. You can hear the producers in the background (‘and… action’). They even talk to her (‘show me some more pouty… aw…’). How many people ignored that? That seems like a big oversight on someone’s part. I’d be embarrassed to put something like that on the web.

And that’s saying a lot given last my previous production!

Sure, the site probably didn’t take much time to make. Unfortunately, it shows. I think this is a pretty simplistic attempt at something ‘viral’ and so far it’s worked. But who did this, and why would they?

How to improve

Raise your hand if you enjoy Clippy.

Anyone with marketing sense would realize this is a terrible idea. First, where’s the value-added? It’s a talking search box on loop. Personally, I’d make her a lot more inappropriate. Suddenly an annoying gimmick becomes entertainment. That’s better execution. Godaddy used it and it seemed to work for them.

EVB messed up

This surprises me: after some quick research the company behind this site is EVB. They’ve made some great stuff and were even honored at SXSW for their work. EVB claims to “deliver entertaining and engaging content that connects with consumers” but I don’t see it in this site. I see an attempt to deliver something more personal (someone talking to me) and dynamic (my input or lack thereof initiates action from her).

But, overall, it’s lame. Daniel, if you’re listening, provide some insight, please?

Ford Can’t Sell to Students

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I received a neat little letter from Ford in the mail today. As with all junk mail, I opened it. To my surprise I was invited to purchase an 06/07 vehicle from Ford and instant get $500 off! Wowzers, Ford, great idea! Let me go visit your cool website: fordcollegehq.com. Whoa, wait. What is this? There’s no way a student ever looked at this website before Ford sent out this letter… no self-respecting 18-35 year old would have spent more than three minutes on here. So, Ford, why didn’t you get someone’s expert opinion? That’s a rhetorical question becuase I’m here to give it to you anyway.

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