Down Home Advice for Online Community Builders

I must have walked past this sign/poster thousands of times and simply not paid attention to it before. It is behind the glass on the noticeboard of a community ministry in my neighborhood of Noe Valley — in San Francisco. I’m posting because  I talk to so many corporate marketers who are frustrated that their online community building efforts are not taking off. And when I look closely at their communities, I see that they are so focused on the “online” and they so often forget the “community” … and, in the end, so many basic tenets of “plain old community building” as described in this poster, just are not present.  I will likely write more about this in the future, but for now just think about how your company or organization can do its version of the acts the poster calls for. What does it mean for you to, for example, “sit on your stoop” or “find a lost dog” or “help carry something heavy” ? If your corporate communications goals include having a vibrant community, this sign is worth reading and thinking about.

Blessed are the Meeker, Devitt and Wu

If you believe, as we do at Rassak, that effective communication in the digital era involves understanding the future of communications platforms and devices (in addition to the words, images, video and more that are delivered over them)… then this new edition of the Morgan Stanley Internet Trends presentation from Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt and Liang Wu is a fascinating (and important) read.

Synthetic Life’s Cute Face

[Photo Credit Science]

I don’t want to read too too much into this… but I was struck by the image accompanying a decent amount of the online coverage of Craig Ventner et al’s synthetic cell that’s been global front-page news  over the last week. Artificial life tends to spook people — not give them the warm fuzzies. And yet this cartoony photo is warm, fuzzy, even cute! Was it a deliberate choice to include this photo in the Science magazine article released by the team of biologists?  They are business people too, and they have an interest in making their news accessible/human/soft/unscary to lay people (regulators and donors are often lay people as well) — so a human touch (even a subconscious one — in the form of perceived doe-eyes and mouth) is valuable.

Doing the Honors — Leveraging Human Desire To Build Community

YouTube is not always what it seems. On the face of it it’s a video site. It’s also a search engine (some say it’s the second largest one). It’s also a great example of a community … and their community platform offers many lessons for digital community leaders. Here’s one:

My almost-teenage son was very excited last night. He and some friends made a tribute music video of a song by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.  They posted it to YouTube.  He was thrilled that the video received three “honors.” The video was ranked as most watched, top rated and most discussed — in a specific category, in a specific geographic region.

Good community organizers understand the desires of their members. Great community organizers leverage those desires to grow and engage their communities.

YouTube — one of the most fascinating community platforms — has leveraged technology to do just this. At least 100 community members multiplied by a huge, huge, huge number of categories and geographic regions were “honored” (great choice of word!) with feel-good feedback on their work yesterday. And this happens everyday. This is certainly not the only reason that 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute (source, YouTube).  But it certainly helps.

PRACTICAL TIP: Even if you don’t have the technology built into your community platform, do something (anything) today to honor members. And honor them for something that will encourage an action that will grow and further engage members in your community.

P.S. Check out the video… my son plays Bieber :-)

Brandbending: A (Quick) Experiment in Perception

Are You Hiding?

The brochure of the exhibit

Last Saturday I checked out an exhibit called “Hide, Skin as Material and Metaphor.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York. While I cant’ say I liked the work visually, it certainly struck me as interesting on a number of levels.

It really got me thinking about skin… and really what the skin of our companies are.

Brands are definitely a skin. And they often are something companies hide behind—a manufactured image beamed over TV or ads that can bear little connection to the reality.

Social/digital/community media is changing this.

When people become the carriers of the brand in a very active way (employees, customers, partners) the skin of the company changes a lot.

For people in charge of branding, that’s a wonderful or scary thing. Or both.

BTW, the museum is in a really cool building.. the customs house at the foot of Broadway, almost at the lower tip of Manhattan. According to a plaque outside, customs duties were the main source of US revenue before the income tax was instituted. And most customs duties came through that building.

From The Dialog Box Collection

If everything communicates then nothing communicates more than your product itself. And digital products, cold and technical as they are underneath, can be made very warm and filled with personality and human-ness.

Dialog boxes are great for this. I collect them (well, screenshots of them) and will begin to share them here, from time to time.

This one is from the Customer Relationship Management tool we use at Rassak. It’s called Batchbook. I loved the little ego boost the product gave me when I uploaded my first batch of contacts. This is instead of saying something boring like “processing, please be patient.”

This is a company that knows about customer relationships and the emotions that drive them—and they are baking that knowledge into their product design. Awesome. BTW, Batchbook is also making a little lemonade here. They are turning a negative (having to wait because they can’t process names that quickly) into a positive (feeling good  because you have a lot of contacts).

Oh, That $370

I was just looking at plane tickets from Barcelona to New York and came across some digital branding/communicating that, while quite possibly effective in the near term, can in no-way be helpful in the long term.

This is just plain (no pun) obnoxious. Though I do feel for these guys. They are in a brutally competitive sector and, no doubt, using a big bold font for the inexpensive ticket prices combined with small, light-gray font for the taxes and fees, works in the moment (sometimes). And a lot of companies do it, to varying degrees. These guys just took the cake on this particular search.

But it cannot work over time. It does not build trust. It destroys it.

$141 of sizzle, $370 of fizzle

This reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a marketing head for a well-known online brand (not in the travel sector) that has used aggressive pricing and taken a direct, make-the-sale-now approach to their marketing (and therefore their brand) since their earliest days. They are starting to explore  a more comprehensive brand that is built on other benefits and personality traits of the company– because people aren’t buying their story as much any more–and because competitors are beginning to use their story against them.