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Online Community Building: Three Critical Ingredients

I was recently interviewed by Dan Greenfield of Social Media Today for an article called, ‘Social Networking’s Field of Dreams.’ Dan’s article puts forth a key question that any business contemplating embracing social networking needs to come to terms with.

Simply put, if you build it (community), will they (consumers) come?

Having worked with literally hundreds of companies – big and small – over the past few years on both formal community-building initiatives and ‘conversational’ marketing campaigns, I can say without hesitation that the answer is an emphatic “NO.”

Why? Because communities are living organisms that are most analogous to gardens; they must be tended to, cultivated, and fertilized if they are to take root, grow and thrive.

Given that fact, let me be blunt. If you are not prepared to commit to the following three cornerstones of a successful online community-building initiative, you should not undertake the effort to begin with.

Item one is the raw ability to design a communal space that is engaging, speaks with a clear voice to the target audience, has a clear target audience and a well-defined set of “hot spots” that you are trying to drive users to (e.g., blogs, forums, photo or video archives).

The second item of importance is having someone on the community-building side that is effective at reaching out to the spots online where a community’s target audience currently hangs out (e.g., related blogs, discussion groups, etc.), and having a strategy to compellingly communicate the WHAT, the WHY and the SO WHAT of your community to that audience.

The good news is that real businesses and organized groups already have a pre-existing mailing list that can be engaged, but simple Google searches can also help identify popular web sites and relevant news articles that you can target to build ‘bread crumbs’ back to your community.

The last item that drives success in communities is the existence of one or more community leaders that who are responsible for driving conversations, posting and spotlighting relevant content and the like.

So what does a successful community-building effort look like? Let me give you three examples.

Mybatanga_logo In the consumer arena, check out Batanga, a media and entertainment company targeting Hispanics, that has built a 300K member community called MyBatanga by combining a white label social networking platform (from my company, Snapp Networks) with their own proprietary user-generated radio station building tools and then leveraged viral distribution strategies to expand their reach to other social networks, music-oriented discussion forums and the like.

In the business-to-business arena, Ragan Communications, a publishing house targeted at the corporate communicators vertical, has built a thriving 10K member community called MyRagan by successfully targeting professional communicators, like PR personnel.

Key to the company’s success has been leverage of a built-in base of thousands of customers, a mailing list of many tens of thousands of prospective customers, a deep library of professional-grade print and video content, and an editorial-driven mindset that ensures that from a community perspective, purpose/audience, design, outreach, content and conversation are bounded by a very clear context. (They are also a Snapp Networks customer, with my company, V:social, powering their video channel capabilities).

Lastly, there is The Knot, a popular web site for couples planning their weddings, which has recently launched the Real Wedding Awards, which calls upon visitors to the site to sign up for the awards and submit photos, videos and web pages of the best weddings of 2007 (and now, 2008).

Because of the tight integration and messaging synchronicity of the awards with the site’s core purpose as a wedding planning resource, the conversational marketing campaign (which is powered by V:social) has generated thousands of new registrants and almost 10K media submissions in a couple of weeks.

Related Posts:

My post explaining how social media works, ‘Social Media: it’s about Breadcrumbs and Conversations.’
On the role of brand in social media initiatives and how not to diminish your brand equity in the process: Don’t Subordinate your Brand.
A short video on ‘What is Social Media Marketing?‘

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Online Community Building: Three Critical Ingredients

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