MindComet

Things to consider when building your online community

Communities require nurturing

Ok, so you’ve launched your community. You did your due diligence and researched your target users, established your objectives, spent a week developing your strategy and doing risk assessment exercises, and hired a developer to build and launch your community. There’s only one thing left - getting people there.

A community without people is worthless. So how do you get them there?

Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet or secret sauce to attracting hordes of people. So I’m going to share a couple of method for attracting members. BUT, before I do, you have to realize the following - Getting people to your site and building up your community will most likely be a loooong grind. Once you start down the road of community, you have to have patience and you MUST stick with it. Just ask Gary Vaynerchuk. Once you have people to your site, you also have to keep them coming back. Losing community members as fast as you gain them nets you nothing. Preventing this is simple - Provide engaging content, but more importantly respect their voice and care enough to respond to it. This will earn their trust, respect and loyalty.

So what are a couple of ways to initially attract visitors?

* Do a media buy or SEM campaign. It cost’s money, but can get you visitors. The quality of these visitors, however, is debatable. Expect lower conversion rates.

* Join other communities and make new friends. This should be done in a non-spammy and non-intrusive way. You want to make genuine connections with people and they’ll take an interest in you and ultimately in your community. The quality of these visitors and the expected conversion rates will be high.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 27, 2009

The power of crowd sourcing

I’m in love with the idea of crowd sourcing.

If you’re not familiar, crowd sourcing is allowing a community to submit ideas to your organization and then lets the community vote on which ideas are it’s favorite. These ideas could be product development, product enhancement, or whatever your want. The sky is the limit when it comes what kind of ideas that you’re sourcing.

Dell does a great job with the Ideastorm community. A site that is run by a team of two, has amassed over 10,000 ideas, which have been voted on over 700,000 times! In a recent interview, they stated that their biggest challenge with Ideastorm is figuring out how to disperse all of these ideas to the appropriate people at Dell. In my opinion, that’s a good challenge to have.

Another fine example of crowd sourcing from Starbucks is My Starbucks Idea. Following the exact model as Ideastorm, it’s help Starbucks engage it’s customers in powerful new ways.

When a new user navigates the the My Starbucks Idea site, their greeted with the following message -

“Help shape the future of Starbucks - with your ideas. You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us”

That is powerful powerful stuff. Starbucks users are made to feel that they have a role in shaping the future of Starbucks and not just through purchasing. Users are alos able to see, which of their ideas, if any, were adopted by Starbucks.

What companies would you like to see crowd sourcing your ideas? What ideas would you suggest?

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 25, 2009

Doug and Jeremy’s Santa Ynez tour

Thanks to the welcoming people of Santa Ynez and surrounding areas. You’re lucky to live in such a beautiful and friendly place.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 20, 2009

The importance of defining the value proposition of social media

Getting social media in the door to business leaders is difficult. To them, Social Media is this very nebulous thing. They’ve heard of it. They’re probably on Linked-in. They might be on Facebook. However, many of them don’t understand the value proposition of social media.

Simply put, a value proposition is what makes you better than your competition. Wait. Social media has competition?

Well, in business it certainly does. Social media is competing for a share of the budgetary pie, especially in the current economic environment. If I sell a social media project to a client in 2009, most likely, they got the budget for it by cutting something else. Selling social media through the “everybody else is doing it” factor, just doesn’t cut it. So what, if everyone else is doing it! People want to know how it will specifically help or save/make them money. Clearly defining the value proposition of social media is imperative.

Take for example online support forums. Social media is directly competing with salaries for support technicians and managers, rent, and expenses for phone systems and workstations.

Here is how I’d define the value proposition of online tech support forums

“It is a fact, proven by organizations like Dell and Pitney Bowes, that companies who provide online support forums will save money through reduced support staff headcounts and decreased call center facility overhead by reducing support call volumes. One method to reduce call volume though online support forums is to allow customers to support each other. This new model of support allows organizations to resolve a higher volume of issues by simply scaling up support forum infrastructure instead of the very expensive route of scaling up staff and facilities. Another method of savings, which has the same benefits as the first, can be achieved by allowing users to search through an online archive of solutions, and provide self-service support. This is a feature that phone support systems simply do not offer.“

Do you have any value propositions that you would define for social media?

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 19, 2009

Pitney Bowes is getting sexy with social media

Pitney Bowes, the manufacturer of postage meters and other mailing related products and services, may not be a sexy brand, but they’re acting sexy by embracing social media.

So what are they doing that’s getting me so excited?

For one, they’ve setup a customer support forum to guide users through a variety of problems. The most common of which are issues related to postage increases. When the USPS raises it’s rates, Pitney Bowes customers are required to reprogram their machines, which results in increased call volume. Pitney Bowes was smart, realized the potential of online support and now allows customers can submit their requests online. The beauty of this is that customers can search through previous support requests for answer to their issue. This self-service model has resulted in a 30% decrease in call volume to the Pitney Bowes call center.

Secondly, they are asking their customers three questions about how to improve Pitney Bowes in a section they call the “Think Tank” and allow users to vote on the ideas.

1. What Else Do You Want Your Mailing Machine To Do? 
2. What kind of software or web service would help your business? 
3. How can we make the PB.com website work better for you?

This section doesn’t really have high participation yet, but it’s exciting to see them implementing suggestion box functionality. I’d be interested to know if any user submitted ideas have made it’s way into the Pitney Bowes product or service line.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 17, 2009

Marketing dollars shift in response to economy

2009 is here, along with new budgets that reflect both our weakened economy and a shift in marketing tactics. Technological advances and increased scrutiny of corporate spending have precipitated two significant shifts in marketing budgets.

The first of these shifts that we're seeing is budgets for costly offline print and TV campaigns being redirected to online efforts. So, why the shift? As I mentioned earlier, corporate spending is increasingly being scrutinized and CEO's want to know that they're seeing returns on their investments. Traditional campaigns are expensive and the advent of services such as TiVo and DVR are driving up the already high cost of TV impressions. To make matters worse, tracking the results of offline campaigns is difficult, if not impossible. Online provides more affordable and measurable channels for marketing.




In addition to the online shift of marketing dollars, we're also seeing a dramatic change is how that money is spent online. Until recently, banner ads were the focus of many online marketing budgets. However poor click-through and dismal conversion rates have marketers looking for new avenues, specifically, online video and social media.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 06, 2009

Feb Florida community events

List of February social media and technology events for Florida

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 04, 2009