Building the community

Back to Digital Marketing class index. Now updates at Alex's site: Digital Marketing: Community

Class Slides: Building Community

Building Community with Value
Quirky: One Week, 3,000 Product Ideas
8 Things to Avoid When Building a Community
How to build an open source community

add: How a Tiny Startup Used Reddit to Build an Army of 1,400 Ambassadors (and How You Can Too)

Examples:

• AlexBrownRacing
• Dell
• Red Bull
• Clear Admit
• Quirky
• sourceforge

As part of a content marketing strategy, a goal of a content producer may be to create content that builds community. We examine this idea with a focus on AlexBrownRacing.

View this 30 minute video: Knowledge at Wharton: Social Media for Social Causes

(another example: The Building Blocks of Community)

Community

• Galvanized by desire for information
• Purpose

Blog:

• Content marketing
  • Morning update
  • Fair Hill Update
  • Horse racing news
  • Horse welfare news
• frequency, deliberate and consistent (x3+ per day)
• transparency
• signal value: content and timing
• Growth: viral (updates linked elsewhere on discussion boards etc)& google ads
• work with media to develop story. Key, not to break news, but to make sure the story is told

Discussion Board

• Added to foster conversation
• Initial reluctance of community
• Folder design shapes dialogue
• Managing conversations: rules, freedom of speech?
• Managing conversations: let them develop, do not get involved
• Managing conversations: listen
• Viral growth, positive virus
• Fundraising model, why not centrally controlled?
• Mission statement: importance for focus
• Banning and consequences thereof:
  • imposters versus idiots
  • attention seeking behavior
  • Ego, "Greater good" versus the individual
  • for every action there is a reaction (broader consequences of banning)
  • No warning, no public engagement, no idle threats
  • Control over DB content, but not preexisting relationships, e-mail, and other sites
  • Surrogate sites and ICERS
• Managing factions within the community
  • animal rights versus horse racing
  • rescuing within the slaughter pipeline versus hardcore anti-slaughter
• Viral growth, positive virus

Additional Social Media Tools (Community architecture)

• Strategic adoption
• Experiment, with goals, be prepared to make mistakes
• Increase reach
• Increase connectedness of community
• Brand building
• Different types of content, reporting (twitter)
• Target different audiences

• Wiki
• Facebook: Group versus Fan page
• Twitter
• FlickR
• YouTube (Horse slaughter contest, a tactic to get wider coverage of issue)
• Blogtalkradio
• Book

Horse Slaughter Contest on YouTube

• Contest, prize as incentive
• Rules: Viral and google juice
  • Most comments, highest rating, most views
  • Keywords in title, description etc.
• One month voting period, producers goals
  • Create good content
  • Promote content with their networks
• PG 13

Goals

• Best Barbaro updates
• Horse welfare shift
• Goals re: managing the site, versus the focus of the site
• Community drives the outcomes, goals of managing the site focus on growing the community

Three different target audiences

• Fans of Barbaro
• Horse welfare and horse racing communities more broadly
• Those interested in the work of Fans of Barbaro, ABR, for example: Media

Managing the brands

• Alex Brown Racing
• Fans of Barbaro
• Alex Brown

ABR and Fans of Barbaro: A tribe

• Disrupted the status quo of the horse welfare space
• Creates tensions with leadership within ABR, how does leadership emerge
• Tensions between ABR and other horse welfare communities
• Powerful voice

My role:

• PR
• Rule maker, banning usernames
• Blog: content provider
• Strategic implementation of social media tools

Miscellaneous

• Site design unchanged, design usability learned