The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

Excuse me for the rather clichéd title, but it’s late and I just finished reading a great article over at A List Apart magazine talking about how the (insanely popular) photo-sharing network Flickr first began to grow their community and how they gradually nurtured it to full health. I definitely recommend reading the entire article but for those of you looking for the quicker fix here are the main pointers to building a successful social network:

1. Your members are the true owners of the community – allow them to push your site/application into uses you never even thought of – be prepared to just stand back and be amazed at how people take your ideas and run with them.
2. Stay neutral/transparent – don’t dole out too many rules, allow your users to figure out their own laws and police themselves.
3. Hire a community manager – this is something you’ll definitely need as your community grows – somebody to embody the establishment but not as a shadowy corporate figure, rather more like a school teacher on duty at recess – just there to make sure nobody gets hurt or into too much trouble, and be available to answer questions about the site. We have a community manager or two over at Navy For Moms and so far it’s working out great.
4. Be prepared for your garden to take a while to grow. Communities don’t happen over-night.
5. Be personable: react to your members’ suggestions and feedback, blog about your plans/progress, provide plenty of ways in which members can send you both praise and criticism – be prepared to receive both.
6. Write for humans: form labels, introductions, error messages, instructions, guidelines, faq’s etc – write them all with real people in mind. Leave legal speak to the legal geeks and give people what they can actually read without a lawyer, priest or English professor present. It usually doesn’t hurt to throw in a little humor too, pander to a human being’s, oh I don’t know, human side?
7. Keep it simple, chumpslice! Design for users, not the CEO, or the CEO’s wife, or the investors. Design it so anyone can figure out quickly how to use the site and be so engaged they will want to stick around and dig further and maybe even sign back in the next day. Remember that having a high member count is not necessarily the same as having active profiles and therefore actual user engagement.
8. Don’t force casual visitors to sign up for a full profile before they can even click around and see what’s on the site. Let them explore and ‘try before they buy’ so that the safety of anonymity is something they can have whilst deciding whether to join up or not.

It’s all too easy to make the assumption that you can ‘plop’ a social media network onto your business like a magic seed and it will just sprout into a beautiful new source of revenue and buzz for your company – not so. You have to give your community room to grow and at the same time know where and when and how to get involved.

Tags: Social Media, social networking