Marketing today: community

USAToday.com

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:06:34 GMT

Looking for a good Monday morning giggle. USAToday.com posted an article describing all the wonderful new features they have added to their website to make it more engaging and community driven. A user can use tagging to navigate content, they can upload their own photos, ranks stories to show the community what's most interesting (think Digg), and of course the crown jewel of community engagement... you can now add comments. But the thing that gave me quite a chuckle this morning as I'm swigging down my Starbucks is the comments at the end of the story. I'm reading through this story hearing about all the cool new features the author wants me to know about then I get down to the comments section and the first ten comments I read are about how terrible the new site layout is. To quote the most recent comment of 16 minutes ago "Your revised website stinks!" Now that is just funny! One commenter from 1hr 30 min ago makes an incredibly valuable and insightful comment that unless someone from USAToday responds to the comments being made it really doesn't do any good to have comments. Which makes me go hhhmmm. That is a good point. How often to you see sites that take comments but don't offer an visibility into what happens when those comments are read? I'm much more likely to add comments and suggestions if I know someone is listening and I can have an influence. If there are comments just for the sake of looking good but no action behind them doesn't that make it even worse that if they left well enough alone in the first place.

I'm going to watch the USAToday page and see how long it takes someone to respond to the comments they are getting. Because as of now they are taking a beating...

Building Community

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:44:09 GMT

Build it and they will come. Or will they? Over the last year I've spent quite a bit of time working on building a community website called Skyscrapr. What? Why? Where? How? I'll get to all that.

First; why? Our group was doing a great job of satisfying our current audience, the software architect. But one thing we weren't doing was taking advantage of the MSFT developer community which is very strong and passionate about MSFT technology. So my thought was what can we do to leverage the developer love and is there an unmet need in the marketplace for an introduction to architecture site? I did my research and found out that my hypothesis was true. There is an untapped market of developers and part time architects that are interested in architecture and vastly undeserved. There was no resource for them to go to to learn about how to become an architect and connect with other developers interested in architecture. So step number one of marketing 101 was covered. I had identified an unmet need in the market and one that could increase my share and brand.

What is it? The exact value proposition I wrote was "Skyscrapr offers developers, aspiring architects and part time architects a place to find architecture guidance and be a part of an online community dedicated to learning about Architecture in a fun and inspiring way."

Where? Interesting question. For now, online. But in the future this is something that could easily be built into an offline offering as well. User groups meetings, etc.

How? This was the big one. I didn't know anything about community site technologies but found lots of resources around MSFT to ask. That investigation led me to Telligent which makes a product called Community Server. This is the technology Skyscrapr is built on. It's pretty good. They are in version 2.1 right now and releasing 3.0 sometime this spring. The technology allows for customer ratings, blog commenting, and other community activities. When we first launched a lot of the features I wanted weren't in version 2.0 so we wrote too much custom code. Always avoid this at any cost. It's expensive, time consuming and frustrating. We are now on a schedule that will add new features when a new version of CS becomes available and we've minimized any custom code development.

What is success? At first success was page views, plain and simple. Is there traffic to the site? Since this project was creating a new audience as well as a new website we had no baseline to compare traffic against. We set some pretty low expectations and surpassed them. We are still interested in traffic, but now KPI's are measuring community engagement. Are viewers commenting? Are they engaged in more than just viewing? How many register with the site? How many request to be blogger's on the site? What is return traffic like?

Lessons Learned

1. Content is king. Have a strong content management plan. It's not going to fall out of the sky! People will come in the beginning if you do good marketing but people only come back if you have something interesting to say.

2. Everything takes longer and costs more than you would ever imagine.

3. You will have to champion the program and continually resell the idea to upper management. These things take time to build. It's not like a banner ad campaign where the click through results are instantaneous. This is more like planting blurbs in the fall and waiting for them to pop up in the spring.

4. Big personalities help. We have a regular podcast show called ARCast that drives about 50% of the traffic, particularly through RSS.

5. Design good UX. Do your homework and don't rely on vendors knowing what's best. More is less with site design and a lot of vendors will sell you glitz but don't think about SEO and rendering times.

6. Review goals regularly. As the community gets stronger and needs become more apparent be flexible enough to re-evaluate KPI's.

7. Always ask for feedback. I recently read an article that said companies get better satisfaction scores from customers simply because they offered the ability to give feedback.

8. Have fun with it and your customers will to. I have cartoon strips. Need I say more.

Yahoo's Brand Universe

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:02:15 GMT

Yahoo has announced it plans to build 100 individual web sites this year around entertainment brands. That in and of itself isn't so newsworthy. What interesting about it is Yahoo doesn't own the brands they are planning to promote. The first six brands they will lead with are video games "The Sims" and "Halo," TV shows "Lost" and "The Office," and franchises Harry Potter and Transformers. Yahoo says they are not asking for permission from the companies that own the brands and will not proceed if the owners object. This is what is really brilliant about their plan. They publicly announce they are going to use these popular brands that they DO NOT own to drive traffic to their sites, thereby getting impressions from the advertisements which drives revenue for Yahoo. They do say that they will honor any requests from corporations that chose not to be involved. Let's play this out, shall we. Say The Sims decides they don't want to be involved. They own the brand and have a right to any revenue that brand may generate even if it's advertisement impressions. So The Sims contacts Yahoo and says please pull The Sims community site. Yahoo already has the site up so now it has to explain to it's users that The Sims doesn't want to play nice and share the brand with them so they are going to have to close the site. Who gets egg on their face. Not Yahoo.

What I'm having a hard time understanding is why would someone who is interested in The Sims go to Yahoo to build a community when The Sims has a very good community site, as I'm sure most of the entertainment brands Yahoo is targeting does? What is the value proposition Yahoo sees by creating communities that already exist somewhere else? What can Yahoo offer that is going to be so compelling it's a differentiator in the market? Yes, I can see how initially Yahoo could get some increased traffic to their site. But at what point do people become over saturated with community sites? I listed in a previous blog post 21 different network/community building sites. That list doesn't include the thousands of big brand community sites.

Would love to know what others think.