Letters to the Web Strategy Editor: Online Community Strategy

I love helping other people, the more I help others, the more the love comes back to me, most of my incoming business is word of mouth, refferal or from folks who read my blog. The ROI of my blog is definatly positive.

While I can’t answer every email and question, new Facebook friend Colin has introduced me to Kim Cross. She writes in with the following question:

Jeremiah,

…I’m interested in ways I can develop a social network for my (national) magazine We already have a very strong online community of readers, who communicate via the message boards. Colin made some interesting points about how you can’t force a social network - you can only provide tools and and platforms, then watch it take off on its own.

I’m also interested in personalization software. Are there any out-of-the-box providers that create a recommendation-engine type function (a la Amazon, Netflix - based on user behavior and preferences)?

Thanks to both of you!

Kim Cross

Kim, great stuff, magazines need to quickly adapt to the online space, this is where readers are headed, discuss stories, and even can create new ones.

A few concepts about communities:

Join before creating
Consider joining existing communities before creating new ones. In the past, I’ve given examples of how Walmart created a MySpace clone and it failed in 10 weeks. Why? Because it was too heavily marketed and the community already existed, in MySpace! I’ve also reviewed NBC’s Hometown online community that’s building an online community, don’t replicate existing content –aggregate. Remember communities and marketing are not just one two domains only.

Social features
The above may not apply as it sounds like you’ve got a thriving community already, and they’re exploding at the seams in the message boards or forums, moving to the social network model is a natural evolutionary step. I’ve got the master list of White Label (means you can rebrand them) social network tools here. The scary part is there are about 60 of them and it grows every week. I highly recommend you make a list of requirements (I know what to look for) and then start contacting a few. Look for control of one’s data, profile, and widgets as key features, sorry I can’t make any recommendations at this time, as I’ve not reviewed all 60 of them. Also take a look at this online collaboration platforms list, they have social features too.

Bottom up can build better
The beauty of online communities is that they can create content for you, consider this as part of your editorial process. Tools like PublicSquare can help a community create, submit, clean, and publish content, this could become articles in your magazine or even be an online supplement. Rely on the power and knowledge of your community. Many media networks have a series of blogs that roll up into homepages, these can be the voices from your readers or even your editorial staff. Whatever you do, don’t let the magazine be one-way.

I reccomend, you reccomend
Recommendation engines, yup, guess what. I have that list too see this List of companies that provide Behavioral Recommendations and Social Recommendations Web Services. This space is moving out of the eCommerce space only, and now to content, media, and ideas.

There’s a lot of other information that I have to share, this is just scratching the surface, so I can’t give that all away, I’m a social media consultant, available for hire at my company where I’m employed full time, you can contact me at my email in the top right column.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 7:50 am and is filed under Social Media, Social Networking, Web Strategy. 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.