Love Your 1%
If there’s only one secret I can pass on about keeping a healthy and vibrant online community — it’s this. Love your 1%.
It only takes a few people to engage hundreds of others and as a community owner/builder it is your job to keep those few as pumped and engaged about their participation in your dream as possible. If you treat these folks like family you’ll reap the rewards.
Remember a community is built on dialogue. You need someone to provide the spark, ask the question, answer the others and so on. If not, you could end up with a community of 10,000 inactive people. It’s not a stretch. I’ve seen it.
There’s many ways to reward and love your 1%. You make them feel important, you make them feel like they matter. Here are a couple of examples of how I’ve done this in the past:
- Send a personal message to your 1% on a weekly, or monthly basis thanking them for their involvement in the success of the site. Everyone loves recognition.
- Showcase or give a “shout out” to your 1% on the home page of your site. Not only will this recognize your active 1% but will attract others to be more active so they can get on the home page too.
- Send your 1% special items of appreciation, t-shirts, hats, stickers or money letting them feel like they are truly a part of your team. Remember this is your virtual staff.
- Invite them to participate in a planning meeting for new site features. This will not only give you the chance to talk with them, but you’ll get valued opinions and advice for the next steps of your community.
Lastly, and most importantly, remember you have to be genuine. That’s BE genuine … not act genuine
Practice Makes Perfect
So I thought I’d give it a shot and start my own social networking site on as small a budget as possible. I selected a niche that I’m passionate about (fishing) and had a few connections in family and friends that could dedicate a little time to giving the site the push start it needed.
getREELed (www.getreeled.com) was launched mid-March as North America’s Largest Social Network Dedicated to Fishing. I remember sitting on the site, with my brother and I as the only two registered users, thinking how is anybody going to find this place. I think calling it the “largest” actually helped the first users believe that this site was going to be something. They loved the idea that they were there first.
We had two members, a framework of a social site, no content and no members.
So off I went and did some of the guerrilla tactics I preach so much about to see if we could get the site off the ground. We woke up the next morning and had 5 members. We kept at it for a couple of days and enlisted some of the first members as “unpaid guerrilla’s” and here we are two weeks from launch day with over 1200 registered users and over 175,000 page views.
I’ll keep this blog updated with progress of the site and over-time I’ll start to reveal some of the secrets in developing an engaged community on a shoestring budget.
In the meantime visit GetREELed and check out the awesome fishing photos and content, none of which I contributed.
Facebook - How High Can We Go?
In the past couple of weeks we surpassed 1 million registered users in Toronto. I must say I’m surprised. I thought we’d pretty much reached our upper limit about 6 months ago. Actually it has accelerated, a recent study done showed that the rate at which Canadian’s are subscribing has actually doubled in the past 3 months.
Engaging Your Community Presentation
I had the pleasure of speaking to an audience at the C.A.F.E. (Canadian Association of Fairs and Expositions) event in Toronto last week. I spoke about the power of conversation marketing and leveraging 2.0 concepts in building and dialogging with your customers.
For those of you who were there, you caught my spontaneous ‘brain fart’ where I got caught up in my own thoughts. Totally embarrassing! For those of you who weren’t you’d have this one on me forever. I did, however, regroup quickly and got through my speech no worse for the wear.
Click on the presentation above to view it on SlideShare.
Nifty Dynamic Interface
I was surfing around this morning and stumbled up the newsmap application/interface which was in the spotlight a few years ago. I had totally forgot about it, and how cool it is, and wanted to share it with anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.
newsmap is a live visualization of Google News: a treemap algorithm fills the available screen space, as size denotes the importance of specific headlines, color distinguishes news categories, & brightness the story novelty.
Awesome.
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