I Said, OK

I wrote this for the KickApps blog.

Many of our clients use KickApps to power their online communities for fans, customers or employees. While the purpose may differ, these communities often share common traits and challenges:

Q. How do I get people to participate?
Q. It looks and works great, but why aren’t people active in it?
Q. What do I do with trolls?

Creating and cultivating an online community of passionate fans and customers can deliver tremendous benefits for any brand–greater affinity and loyalty, direct marketing channel to your most passionate customers and deep insight into your customers’ likes and dislikes, to name a few. However, growing an online community is no easy task and it takes time, and more often than not, dedicated resources to make it successful.

Here are some useful resources and tips as you think about your community strategy:

1. “9 Steps to creating a successful online community,” a white paper by KickApps. You can request a copy by sending an email to info@kickapps.com.

2. Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester, compiled a list on his blog about “How to Kick Start a Community.” Here’s his list of things to consider:

a. Create compelling content on a recurring basis. (Content is a key to engagement, together with activities and having a way for people to interact with each other. Whether that’s content you create or your members, make it relevant, interesting and compelling.)
b. Reward users who fill out their profile. (This is about human nature. People are motivated by a handful of different things and we all like a pat on the back or to get something out of a relationship–material or otherwise.)
c. Invite community influencers and advocates to the community first. (Leaders will emerge, by bringing some into your community you’ll get people to follow.)
d. Encourage interaction through conversations. (If conversations don’t start on their own, it’s on you to get it started.)
e. Reward top contributors. (Again, rewarding people for their participation is a great way to tap into that very human need for reward. People will look to this and you’ll tap into another very human need–aspiration.)
f. Centralize your community around your real world events. (This is a great way of extending that experience between the offline and online world. The Phoenix Suns and U2–currently on tour–are great examples of taking advantage of this opportunity.)
g. Virtual events integrate community. (This is the activity piece of the Engagement equation I outlined earlier. Ovation TV held their 3rd Happy Hour online chat last night and got a great showing with members talking about art, photography and music.)
h. Integrate with your website and other customer touchpoints. (Ask yourself how you extend this experience through places like Facebook or Twitter. How do you extend those conversations?)
i. Encourage employees to get active. (Your employees can be your most important community members and advocates to kick start the participation. Let them be open and authentic. If that frightens you, give them guidelines to follow–here’s a great example from the CEO of Zappos about how their employees should use Twitter, note that he doesn’t talk about rules, rather he puts it into the context of their brand values, thus great authenticity from employees.)

As with most blog posts worth reading there’s as much value in the comments. My contribution was around the role of the community manager or as I prefer to call it, the Community Leader. As the host of the ‘party’ the Leader’s role in getting things started is very important. He or she needs to make people feel welcome, introduce new members to each other, lead conversations, encourage people, be a guide.

3. The Community Roundtable is another great resource. It’s an organization created by Rachel Happe and Jim Storer for community managers and social media practitioners. Roundtable members have access to a ton of great information and resources about best practices and new ideas. I think what’s most helpful about this is that everyone learns and teaches in this group. You might work for a B2B technology company like SAP but also find really interesting tips from someone at TripAdvisor, for example.

Also, the Community Maturity Model that they’ve developed is very useful when thinking about your community strategy (http://community-roundtable.com/2009/06/the-community-maturity-model/).

4. Rachel Happe’s blog, www.thesocialorganization.com, has too many excellent posts to talk about here. I really recommend that you take some time to read some of her thoughts (and of course the conversations in the comments that people leave). Here’s a good one to start with: Growing a Community is Like Making Risotto (http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2009/08/growing-a-community-is-like-making-risotto.html).

Also, check out Rachel’s webinar (hosted by KickApps) on 8 Competencies for Socializing Your Organization.

5. Bill Johnston, chief community officer at Forum One Networks, runs the Online Community Unconference and blogs here. Unconferences are a great place to spend a day with peers to discuss any thing you want about online communities. Literally. Attendees to the event develop the agenda in the morning and volunteer to lead or participate in sessions that interest them the most. Highly recommended.

6. eModeration, a KickApps partner, is the most well known provider of community management services. They work with some of the largest brands in the world and help them manage their online community efforts. If you need to outsource your community management, they’re a good place to start.

I hope this information is helpful. Feel free to share any other tips in the comments section.

I met Jennifer Jones last year when she invited me to be a guest on her Marketing Voices podcast to talk about KickApps and social media in marketing. She was kind enough to have me on again and she published the podcast today. We talked about Engagement Marketing and went over some interesting examples of how our clients are using social media and KickApps to engage with their customers. You can listen to the podcast below.

For awhile now, marketers have gotten a bit distracted by social media, the technology and all the hype. To me, social media and the social web do a few things really well, most notably, they enables an entirely new way of connecting and engaging with customers and audiences.

It’s important to remember though that they’re not a panacea to all business ills and certainly aren’t solutions for everything. They are however extremely powerful and effective at enabling engagement, and for that reason, should be considered as part of most marketing and communications strategies.

Much thanks to Jennifer for a great conversation. Oh, BTW, check out my favorite podcast by Jennifer with a Navy fighter pilot flying on the USS Nimitz.

My transition to the cloud and being completely mobile for work and my digital life took a huge step forward when I signed up for SugarSync a few weeks ago. SugarSync is one of many cloud data storage and sync services that enables you to back up, sync, access and share your data over the internet.

With SugarSync you can upload the files on your computer(s) to their servers and the service keeps those files updated when you make changes locally on the computer you’re using. What this means for me and the majority of its users is that I can access those files from any computer that I own, if I download and install SugarSync’s software, or on any computer via a web browser.

It’s an interim step to being completely in the cloud that is pretty significant. While I still like having the data and content that’s most important to me stored locally or backed up on a external hard drive, I want two things: 1. back up and 2. being able to access the content and data on whatever device I’m on. SugarSync does both really well.

The things that that I like:
1. As advertised, it backs up your data and keeps it updated as you update it. Once you set up the management software that sits on your computer it uploads the files you want uploaded and keeps it sync’d in the background (this is an awesome feature). I’ve had a few hiccups where the applications seems to hang and stop syncing but when I Quit and Restart the application it has fixed itself.

2. The iPhone app is great. You can’t make changes to files that you’ve uploaded but you can view and download the files to send in an email. It’s a bit limiting this way. Interestingly, you can stream music files that you’ve uploaded, meaning you can carry your home PC’s music library with you. But, it seems that you can’t stream copy protected music files.

What’s missing?
I wish I could update files via the iPhone. I assume that would require the iPhone app to be able to access common file types (.doc, .ppt and .xls), and make and save changes. Other than that, I’m pretty happy about it.

I haven’t used all the features yet.  The Magic Folder seems to be very useful–enables you to assign files to the Magic Folder and actively make changes to documents in that Magic Folder on different devices. The changes are sync’d as though you’re using the same computer. That’s pretty cool.

I’m a big fan of cloud services. My question now is, will there be a point in time when I’m using too many  services and need to integrate them, or, will there be a single service that will give me everything I need?

Maybe Google will buy SugarSync and Evernote and I’ll be all set.

Thanks to @zarzecks for the suggestion.