Evangelizing your community and how to elicit members to get involved
(posted by Susan Tenby)
(examples added by Carole McManus-- please add more links as you think of examples)
- Do you pay new members/bloggers? Some pay small stipend.
- How do you get values across? First friend comes along, setting ground rules, i.e. saying what the group is about. Paid ambassadors in the early days, popular members to help evangelize to other communities.
- Turn up at conferences, getting bloggers to blog about you. If someone wrote on their blog, get them to post it on your blog too.
- Real life events can help drive traffic to your site.
Examples:[] Upcoming.org is a great way to leverage an existing community to drive interest in your complementary site. Check out Flickr's integration of Upcoming meetups for Flickr users.
- Their site (Minti) was a new site, in a new space. Set up a separate blog to reach others in the space. For example started family 2.0 and tagged on technorati, People started to hear about the site by evangelizing about competitors. Go to Bloggers on other sites
- On of their members created a ritual where members would spread the word. They encouraged the members by giving them stuff for free
- Spread firefox widget buttons, easy way to evangelize
- Users can create their own community blog, you can create your own home page
- How can you get community to scale (open up API), how to make it easy for users to customize the users’ page? How to pimp your page?
- Member builds tutorial of how to do the pimping of site
- For ex, video tutorials (w/celebs)
- Infield Parking using celebrity incentives (meet Dale Earnhardt) to get users to participate and evangelize
- Make a campaign of your evangelizing—highlight your fans (market and promote it)
Examples: Yahoo Answers blog, Flickr blog
- Be totally on top of who is using your site intelligently. Interview them, spotlight, fly them out to conferences, podcast them, vlogs. Ebay brings members into meet Meg Whitman, for ex. eBay Voices Program
- CommunityNext conference was about passion, find the passionate members, make them evangelists, keep on pulse of passionate issues in yr community
- Being humble is important. Bloggers, comments on profile pages, when your members suggest, be humble and reply and listen to their suggestion. The CEO blogs on the site. Share feedback from users thru community blog.
- Myspace and YouTube marketing is important for driving traffic not keeping it
- Hosts became a posse that took over the site, values changed – how to deal with when the moderators become too eager.
- Evangelists are kept separate from admin privileges. (at sony interactive). Most evangelists, they have access to private forum, but not admin. Let evangelists host an event.