Web Social Architecture

Creating an Online Community is Like Parenting

In the next couple weeks, we'll be launching two very interesting community sites for major clients, one in a private beta and the other ready for prime-time. I'll post a bit on why I think they're interesting as they come out.

Over the past months, we've been working hard to prepare our newish-to-community clients for the level of attention that's going to be required from them as their new community sites start to wake up. If they don't know what they're getting into, well, I'd have to say that's our fault--and on the other hand, it's probably also true that nothing can really prepare you.

The run-up to launch has been typical, with mysterious bugs, conflicting ideas about what decisions are most current, sudden late-night panic attacks--the works... just like with any site. But there's a difference. In these cases, the real work is just about to get started.

Yes, your first community site is like your first child. You spent months preparing for the birth. You thought pregnancy was pretty tough. Then the baby arrives....

And like a child, your community will exhaust and frustrate you, but it will also amaze and delight you. It will reinvigorate you and fill you with a new sense of purpose. It will remind you why you're here in the first place.

Your community will rebel against you. It will rage against and defy you. It will call you on every little mistake you make. Ultimately, you'll sense at certain moments, it loves you and wants to be with you (unlike a real child, it has a choice about whether to pay attention to you at all), and it wants you to love it back.

Companies launching into the brave new world of online community and Web 2.0 need to remember, your community is not your web site. Your community is made of humans, and your web site is where they have relationships with each other and with you. Be prepared to nurture those relationships.

The worst thing you can do is throw the switch and walk away, unless you want to see your neglected kid, for the first time in a week, on the nightly news. Goodness, imagine what the neighbors would say!

So my advice is the same for aspiring Web 2.0 corporate marketers as for starry-eyed young couples considering parenthood: "If you feel moved to it, by all means go for it. Just be ready for your business model to change forever."

Going Viral is not a Marketing Strategy

Producing content that spreads across the Internet like wildfire, garnering massive attention at low cost, tends to be seen as an end in and of itself. While on the one hand I think that's true, in that awareness is better than lack of awareness, I also want to suggest that going viral is not enough. You need to connect your viral content to a kind of conversion.

What makes content go viral? It's about people telling other people they like your content. One person likes it, they tell ten more, those ten more tell ten more each, and so on. Back in the day, this meant email forwarding. It's a little more automated these days, but the basic idea is the same. Your content gets voted up on Digg or Reddit. You become a popular bookmark on Del.icio.us. Your photo cracks the Explore page on Flickr. Your YouTube video gets featured.

Suddenly, everyone's looking at you. It's like you should hold up a sign or something.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman illustrates the issue nicely in his post about Digg-baiting via 120' water balloon. His effort to "go viral," executed to perfection, produced the so-called "Digg Effect," that is, a huge short-term increase in traffic:

The question is: What do you do with a huge short-term increase in traffic? And the answer, 9 times out of 10, is, unfortunately, you freeze in the spotlight, and next week try to come up with something else that will be just as viral.

 

Do Not Turn to the Dark Side

Viral content garners many links, and links are good for SEO.

Stephen Spencer, writing about Alan's stunt, breaks down the real reason I say, tongue partially in cheek, that viral is not marketing. He cleverly calls it the "Digg bait and switch:"

So then what's the benefit of getting dugg and getting all those links, you may ask. There really isn't much of one, since you aren't passing that hard-earned link juice on to your home page, product pages, etc. Unless... you add all your links, ads and commercial content to your dugg page as soon as the Digg traffic has died down.

Um, yeah. Brilliant. Cool. Not going to annoy anyone with that approach, and definitely going to sleep well knowing we've offered value to our customers. Clearly, this is the dark side of SEO. You can do better.

 

Converting Viral Traffic

The real key is to do viral to accomplish a goal. Develop a plan for what to do with all the attention, and present an effective call to action alongside or within your viral content. Unless you're offering branded viral content with the aim of raising brand awareness, you usually want to move visitors from one place to another or prompt them to take an action.

The trick with viral, as with all forms of social marketing, is to align the content with your brand. This doesn't always mean branding it per se, but it does mean that a promise of "more like this" alongside viral content offers visitors a value that also serves your business.

 

Building a Strong Subscriber Base

In many contexts, subscription is a powerful benefit, enabling you to sustain relationships over time and repeatedly reach people who want to hear what you have to say. In my estimation, subscription is one of the most powerful indicators of engagement--more powerful than return visits, time on site, and certainly visits. Simply offering a subscription option with your viral content can create opportunities to form lasting relationships.

Lee Lefever has nailed the viral thing a couple times now with his video series, The CommonCraft Show. He posted some stats about the viral effects of his RSS in Plain English video: 80,000 views, 400 new subscribers. A 0.5% conversion rate.

I had my own, MUCH more humble, viral hit a while back, and I found that about one in every hundred visitors subscribed, a 1% conversion. Those subscribers seem to have stuck around now for several months.

Neither Lee nor I included any particularly strong call to action in our viral content (mine wasn't even intentionally viral), so it seems we could probably convert more visitors to subscribers if we were to try.

How many? I have no idea, and I do think you could blow it with a call to action that came across as manipulatively commercial. "You liked our video of the anaconda swallowing a robot vacuum cleaner? Maybe you'd like to purchase a new cell phone!"

Anil Batra noted a while back that his number of subscribers increased when he had a longer gap between blog posts. Goodness gracious! What could that mean? Apparently Anil has a theory.Yo Anil, care to share?

The Members Project: Branded, Participatory, Corporate Charity Campaign

A colleague pointed out American Express' The Members Project to me yesterday, and I am pretty impressed with the concept. It's the only example I've seen of a major corporation launching an online community to execute a charitable activity in an unabashedly branded environment, with banner ads--and not seeming to pander to or exploit customers' altruistic instincts.

It's also only one of two great examples I've seen of a many-to-one modality in online community, where customers speak collectively to the corporation. (The other one is Dell's IdeaStorm.)

The basic idea is American Express will donate a dollar for every participant to a charitable project suggested by a participant and selected by the community. American Express pays a dollar for your attention, and you help decide what to do with the dollar.

And brilliantly, your dollar is pooled with the dollars of all the other participants. Collectively you decide how your dollars should be used. Collective intelligence identifies the worthiest idea, and your experience as a participant is of belonging to a group doing something wothwhile--which just happens to be branded. You're working in partnership with Amex to decide how to donate some money. You like your partner.

What works so well here for me is the comfortable relationship between the brand and the activity. American Express isn't trying to trick you into thinking it's a nonprofit foundation that only pretends to be a huge, wealthy corporation. It's simply buying your attention (pretty darn cheaply) and engaging you in an activity you can feel sort of good about.

A big part of the effectiveness of the idea is that American Express hands over some control to customers. It respects your collective ability to make a rational choice. Your participation feels meaningful, unscripted.

Amex gets eyeballs on its ads and collects goodwill, customers participate in a positive activity, and a good idea gets funded.

This, rarest of birds, is corporate Web 2.0 done well.

Social Network Marketing: Think Differently about "Placement"

"Social networking" is a term I hear used interchangeably with "online community," "Web 2.0," and, most discouragingly, "viral marketing." In the latest intallment of The Commoncraft Show, Lee has done a nice job clarifying the term for those unfamiliar with it: 

What I like here is that Lee describes social networking in a platform-independent way. Obviously, there are lots of different kinds of web site that could serve as a social network, including blogs, which aren't typically considered social networks. 

Online social networking is a human activity, not a technology type. While there are some very familiar sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Match.com that are typically lumped into a category as "social networking sites," I'm much more inclined to think about social networks in architectural terms. 

From a social architecture perspective, online social networking sites are clusters of linked identity-centric web spaces. While on the one hand, there's no real hard-and-fast line between "social networking" sites like MySpace, which are structured around the individual identities of users, and "social media" sites like YouTube, which are structured primarily around individual pieces of content and secondarily around "channels" (groups of content objects with a common author), on the other hand this difference of emphasis has a huge influence on how these sites are used. 

Most significantly, social networks increasingly cross boundaries between web sites. Behind the power of web services, APIs, widgets, and portable content (like Lee's video above), relationships and content move effortlessly across domains. 

Even more interestingly, social networks are beginning to cross boundaries between our physical and digital lives. Add-on services like Moo's 3rd-party-based business cards herald a new generation of real-world artifacts of our online experience. 

Marketers wanting to tap into "the all-powerful magic of" online social networks need to shift from thinking about (and budgeting for) site based-initiatives and campaigns ("Let's do something on MySpace this fiscal year") and begin viewing social networks as a relational architecture, independent from and superimposed against what I'd call the superficial architecture of mere web sites.