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5 Tips for Building Vibrant Branded Online Communities Justin Fogarty is the online community manager at Ariba, a leading provider of collaborative business commerce solutions. Follow Justin on Twitter @justacio or join the thousands interacting on his community, the Ariba Exchange. The goal of many companies is to facilitate a vibrant online community around a brand or product. This isn't just about creating better Facebook ads, or even in getting more “Likes.” 1. It’s not about ROI or advertising dollars at the beginning. In Facebook’s case, they started with simply facilitating the sharing of information — from personal profiles to pictures. 2. Most communities, like Facebook, are natural extensions of what happens in the real world. 3. If there are two things we learned from MySpace, not everyone is a web/UI designer, and people prefer a clean community. The web has the power to infinitely enhance your capabilities online, but start small. 4. Your content should be short, frequent and easy to engage with. 5.
Social Point of Sale: The Holy Grail for Location-Based Marketers Zachary Adam Cohen runs ZAC, Digital Agency, a boutique digital strategy firm in New York City, working with brands and businesses to re-equip themselves for success in the 21st century. He blogs regularly on topics such as social media, technology startups and the creative process behind digital strategy. He can be found on Twitter @ZacharyCohen. Many have touted the latest advances in location-based technology, but the news is mostly disappointing for marketers, advertisers and digital gurus. Writing in the Times, Joshua Brustein pined: “Everything is in place for location-based social networking to be the next big thing. Brustein’s piece cites a Pew Research Center finding that only 4% of Internet-using American adults have also used location-based services. And yet for those on the front lines of technology, marketing, branding and advertising, that 4% seems painfully low. What’s Missing From the Location-Based Revolution? In a word: Sales. The Potential of Data-Driven Service
8 Things to Avoid When Building a Community Simply having a presence on various online networking platforms won’t work in the social media sphere. The key is spending time to build relationships to not only engage with site users, but to get them to interact with each other. While a lot has been said about how to do it, there are also ways to kill off an online community effort. Here are some pitfalls that online organizations should avoid when trying to foster engagement. 1. Site visitors need to know that there is someone at the other end of the online community who’s listening, and who will respond and engage with them. “The absolute biggest inhibitor is the perception that your contribution is just going into a gaping void,” according to Matt Thompson, interim online community manager for the John S. and James L. For example, on a blog post that doesn't have comments, few people want to be the first to comment. Content curation is an easy, simple way to maximize a return on online community investment. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
3 Ways Live Events Improve Online Communities Katie Morse is a Community Manager at Radian6, the social media monitoring and engagement platform. She blogs at Candid Katie and is @misskatiemo on Twitter. In my role as a Community Manager, I talk to a lot of people online as I work through my day. Whether it’s responding to a tweet, commenting on a blog post, answering a question on LinkedIn, or even responding to a post in a forum, I’m chatting with people from all over the globe on a daily basis. The funny thing is, I’ve never met most of these people. While there is a lot of chatter about online communities, less is said about how to connect your online community members with each other, or with you, offline. Here are three ways live events can help improve your online community. 1. I recently attended SXSW in Austin, TX and met a lot of people in person that I’d had the great fortune of chatting with online, sometimes for years. 2. Think of an online community as a big summer BBQ. 3. Here's the tricky one - bonding. Now What?
10 New Google Analytics Features You Need to Start Using Rachael Gerson spearheads the Analytics division at SEER Interactive. Follow her on Twitter @rachaelgerson. Over the past eight months, Google has steadily released one revolutionary new feature after another. On March 17, the company announced a new version of Google Analytics. Up until this point, users could decide whether they preferred to stick with the old interface or switch to the new one. However, Google recently announced that the old version of GA will be turned off in January 2012. If you're not already familiar with the new version, take the next few weeks to get comfortable with it. 1. Dashboards got a much needed overhaul in the new GA. At a minimum, these four widgets would benefit the average user. Visits - Timeline (can also include Metric)Goal Completions and/or Transactions - TimelineSource/Medium - TableBounce Rate - Timeline 2. Rather than viewing a long list of keywords to spot trends, users can now evaluate a keyword cloud. 3. 4. Why is this important? 5. 6. 7. 8.
HOW TO: Manage a Sustainable Online Community Rob Howard is the CTO/founder of enterprise collaboration software company Telligent. A 2008 Gartner study on social software noted that “about 70 percent of the community typically fails to coalesce.” While the measurement and the statistics behind this statement raise questions, there is an element of truth. There are detrimental effects of over-hyping the technology and then committing the three cardinal sins of running a community: If you build it they will come. All three can cause a community to fail, and there are plenty of examples. Understanding the Community Life Cycle The image below is representative of the different stages of the community life cycle. A community is constantly in one or more of the following states with the exception of the On-Board state: How Is Value Perceived? Most discussions surrounding the topic of community life cycle are based on the work done by Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.
HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Budget As marketers focus on optimizing their social media programs this year, return on investment is going to be a huge consideration. As a result, marketers will — and should — take a more calculated approach towards budgeting for social marketing initiatives. Prioritizing spending on particular social activities, though, is a task that hasn't quite been mastered by most companies. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Founder Charlene Li of digital strategy consulting firm Altimeter Group, released a report on Thursday about "How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets." In short, the report concludes that budgets should be based on the maturity level of a corporation's social business programs. Altimeter interviewed 140 corporate social strategists to create a standard for categorizing programs into novice, intermediate and advanced maturity levels. Assessing Your Social Program's Maturity Level Novice Programs Intermediate Programs Advanced Programs Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Pgiam
HOW TO: Advertise Inside Social Games on Facebook Alex Rampell is founder and CEO of TrialPay, the leading provider of transactional advertising technology that uses the efficiencies of the web to pair online shoppers with ideal offers at every stage of the purchase process. With Advertising Week upon us, many marketers at the NYC conference will be examining the new ways they can reach customers on Facebook. While Facebook is now the largest display advertising site on the Internet, there are many other ways besides display ads for companies to reach consumers on the network. One of the most effective new ways to advertise is inside social games. According to a recent report by Nielsen, online games have surpassed personal e-mail to become the second most popular activity on the web, accounting for 10% of time spent online. Social games provide some unique opportunities for advertisers, as gameplay generally involves virtual goods — things players want, but often don't want to pay for. Hit the In-Game Wall Want to take it up a notch?
Membership Qualifications Membership in our community is a special experience. You’re not joining an association or a networking group — you’re instantly adding a resource that will help you make more informed decisions and operate more efficiently. How to apply for membership: First, review our membership requirements (sidebar) and make sure our community is for you.Contact us and we’ll set up a brief interview. We’ll answer any questions you have and discuss your social media program. Ready to learn more? You’re going to love being a member. Why Your Business Should Consider Reverse Mentorship This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. The word "mentorship" usually evokes imagery of an older, more experienced individual imparting knowledge and know-how upon a younger, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed individual — that's the traditional use of the word that we've all come to know and accept. Alexa Scordato, however, is turning that word on its head with a concept she calls reverse mentorship. Scordato currently serves as the community manager at 2tor, an education technology startup. Fresh out of college, though, she first started her career as an executive assistant at Mzinga, a social software company, where she and Chairman and CEO Barry Libert took part in a reverse mentorship. While reverse mentorship may be a concept that's been in practice for a while, we really like Scordato's take on the subject. There Are Knowledge Gaps on Both Sides
6 Turnkey Tools for Content Distribution Shane Snow is a New York-based tech journalist and co-founder of Contently.com, a marketplace for brand publishers and journalists. It’s never been easier to become a publisher, but being a publisher ain’t easy. Today, the scarce resource in the publishing world is not infrastructure; it’s audience. To compete for reader attention, bloggers are finding they not only have to produce better content, they also have to figure out a way to get it in front of people. Content discovery engine Outbrain composed a haiku on the subject, and though I hate cliches, this one rings true. “If you wrote a blogAnd no one came to read itDid you write a blog?” Fortunately, tools are emerging to help publishers reach new audiences. 1. Outbrain is a lot like Google Adwords for content. Publishers pay a few cents per click, and Outbrain’s marketing team claims the relevancy of the traffic generates 44% higher pageviews per session than search or social media referrals. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
How 4 Small Businesses are Using Location-Based Services The Small Business Round Table Series is supported by the British Airways Face-to-Face Program, which offers U.S. entrepreneurs and small business owners critical tools for building business relationships abroad. See ba.com/contest before October 21. With limited staff and resources, small businesses often don't have the time to test all the latest technologies and social media tools. The Small Business Round Table Series aims to bring groups of small business owners and representatives together to talk about the pros and cons of using various social media and tech tools. For this installment, we brought together four small biz insiders to talk about how their small businesses are using location-based services, such as Foursquare, SCVNGR and Facebook Places. From left: Emily Welby, Josh Pelz, Lauren Drell, Erik Rubin 1. Emily Welby: "I came on board in January, and we had Facebook and Twitter, but we hadn't done much. 2. Josh Pelz: "You get brand advocates telling their friends. 3. 4. 5.