The Onsite vs Offsite Debate



Seems I get this question nearly every presentation I give . “Why build a branded community or blog site, why not build a program where the audience is?” It’s a great question. It’s been one of those staple questions for any presentation along with. ”Have you consider GEO requirements?” and ”How are you measuring success?”.

For 2 years now my answer has been the same; rarely should you establish a program that is focused on one or the other. Meaning if you’re building a social media program it should include a branded community component, the kind that has your company logo proudly in the upper corner of the page, AND activity where most the people go, where the logo isn’t on the page. The answer may seem a bit of a cop-out but there is a more to this than just trying to satisfy two camps of thinking.

For most it is fairly obvious that going where the audience already is, is a good strategy. That may mean going to Facebook, YouTube, or well established communities of interest that are more top of mind destinations for your audience. Howevever based on the those presentation questions, I sense a branded onsite strategy is not as obviously understood. I think the conventional wisdom is a corporate branded community site doesn’t guarantee an audience. A “build it and they will come” approach simply is a stretch in logic.

So why do it? Why not always just go offsite? Why establish a corporate branded social program? My perspective is it’s about building social equity for your company and your brand. The best way to build that social equity is a combined onsite and offsite approach to social activities.

By going external you will undoubtedly be in the conversation. You will be able to assist customers and put a human face on your company. For Intel we’ve seen this to be true. Kelly Feller did a great job building trust in our IT and software developer personas by taking them to Ars Technica. We saw the conversation and attitudes turn from mild cynicism to respect. However it is a challenge to build and sustain equity in this kind of activity alone. These kinds of efforts are spread among many sites, and your voice is be mixed among many other personas. You will likely find there area few core sites where you are able to build buzz, search equity and change perceptions and build a following. These sites are where you are forced to build social equity and relevance.

If you take it one step further and build a branded community site your activities and the community’s activities are automatically in context to your brand. As long as you are following good social practices, i.e practicing transparency and allowing differing on topic opinions, then the community can be very relevant. Conversation Matter’s own Michael Brito is a good example of this. Before Michael’s work, there was not an Intel home for consumer oriented conversations. His work to launch Inside Scoop has now established a destination to hear from and respond to the latest things around Intel consumer technologies. This site is organically growing an audience month over month, and there seems to be no slowing down of the interest in this conversation. We are measuring this with Search results as well. We see that sites like Inside Scoop and Open Port are increasingly capturing more of the search audience for Intel. Bottom line, when your brand acts as the host for a variety of subject matter experts to engage on issues and topics, you can attract an audience and build a following, even from your comfort of your own corporate domain.

But just as going offsite alone is not the best approach, so goes the story for an onsite alone approach. Without being involved in the conversations that are outside of your branded site you are sheltered and less relevant. Taking your bloggers and forum participants out to other communities allows you to build their reputation and personas in the wider conversation. Additionally you cast a wider net with Search when you can be found in a variety of sites. Your branded community then becomes your home base. A place where people know to find your experts and know where to find conversations related to your company and brand.

So in the end the answer is a bit boring, there should not be a debate. Involve yourself in building effective onsite programs and constantly look for opportunities to engage offsite. Get your community managers, your bloggers, and your social media program owners to understand you need a good onsite and offsite mix to increase buzz, built trust, and maintain relevance online.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet… What’s the Big Deal?

Last week a number of separate issues came together around Twitter activity and I just had to wonder why some people are in love with Twitter while others are on the side-lines with folded arms and a scowl.

The divide is pretty strong even among social media advocates. Check out this post from Steven Hodson. Who says

I find it insulting that Twitter is even considered to be in the same field as blogs or even micro-blogs.

This is a common response I get on Twitter. Folks who don’t use it seem to roll their eyes whenever I jump on my iPhone to jot down what I’m doing.

I liken it to people who don’t get social media yet. Folks who say about social networking and blogging “I just don’t know where THEY find the time” As they dash away to check their crackberry.

I sense a bit of social media snobbery regarding Twitter. As if these 140 characters are bits of nonsense, and only fodder for the ubber conversationalist seeking to match their tweet rate with Scoble.

So what is it about Twitter? On the suface I’d say it’s a bit like open mic night. A soap box game of one-liners to see if you can get some attention and pick up more followers. But there IS some hidden marketing value that is not well understood

Breaking it down Twitter it is a continual stream of very short posts, out to a friends network. And as a follower you get a river of thought from people you trust and find relevant. Unlike blog posts, tweets (tweet is to Twitter as post is to blog) are in the moment, real time. They are restricted to 140 characters so they forced to be brief.

This all lends itself to very simple, short and easy to send personal thoughts and updates. “At Starbucks for the 3rd time today.. do I have problem?”

And when you tweet you are filling in those spare minutes of your day. And YES, we do all still have plenty of those. While you wait for your non-fat double half caff-latte order, or wait for a guest presenter figure how to connect his laptop to your projector. These are Twitter moments, which are the same moments other folks are checking voicemail, checking email, or picking the lint out of their pockets For most it’s that spare time that typically goes wasted anyway.

And as you tweet it starts to chronicle your day.

“I’m happy now”….. “I just met my new boss”…. “I’m no longer happy”

This becomes a true web log (yes a blog, my reaction to Mr. Hodson’s post) but unlike typical blog posts it’s in the moment, and not a well crafted & edited diatribe (i.e. this post).

Because of that, there’s a lot of inane and trivial posts that mean absolutely nothing other than exposing the character of the author. For the most part these trivial posts are fun, sometimes enlightening, and peppered with many lame jokes … like office banter.

Do not confuse trivial with worthless or less significant. Consider this, in the mind of customers, banner ads are trivial, annoying and irrelevant, but occasionally they break through.

My perspective is these trivial posts are the primer for the “real content”. Just as banner ads are conduit to deeper call to action, it is the tweet banter that gets people to like you, gets people to trust you. I got 5 new followers after tweeting “Just saw a patch of blue sky while downtown Portland, the locals took notice.” The bottom line is these authentic, unvarnished and all too human tweets build you street cred and an audience.

The “real content” is the stuff between the trivial posts. It’s the information brokering that happens

“Great example at site/snurl/123 on how Dell is using social networking to further their brand”…..

“@CES a great post on what could be the next iPhone”.

So underneath all of the coffee tweets are people marketing information. The marketing goes relatively unnoticed while the message is trusted.

So now we are getting to the upside. Twitter allows you as a marketer to start building an online persona. The reason this is importance is because, well to be honest, the average customer doesn’t trust you as far as they could throw you. As a marketer, you’re biased, manipulative and loud. Generally not very fun to hang with.

By building an online persona you are not the institution. Instead as a regular guy, gal, or other category of human being you are more relatable.

Now the downside. All of what I just discussed is mostly not understood. If you tweet you will be put in the privileged ubber conversationalist category. Folks will be jealous that you are getting away with talking about your favorite book, or how crazy traffic was during those moments they check voicemail and their PDA inbox. The non-virtual twittering world will be against you.

This is all too real. I was just told last week that some employers are watching tweets and wondering why employees are doing this during work. I have not heard of policies yet but there’s communication out there to keep it in control or you will be viewed in the wrong light. The old, manage workers through political pressure trick.

The big reveal here is that too many smart marketing people are missing out on the true value of Twitter. These short trivial posts on the surface look like a wasted time on irrelevant subjects. But what is really happening is information brokering and marketing between some very influential and connected people.

So if you’re into online marketing of your brand, and building personas online to advocate your brand, and can stomach the political backlash, I suggest you try breaking away from checking your smart-phone’s inbox and get into tweeting.

You can follow my trivial stream of nonsense at http://twitter.com/bobduffy

Can Aggregation Improve Your Brand?

Something I often discuss with my collegues is a goal for social media to amplify the voice of the individual over the institution. This is because the institutional voice has lost relevance. It is less trusted.

Research has shown that 90% of the audience to a social site is not interested in participating, but keenly interested in the content. They are interested in this content because 1-10% that is responsible for authoring the content is preferred over the singular voice of an institution.

The voice of the 1% contributors come off as more authentic, especially if that voice doesn’t sound like a marketing drone. Instead the 1% is opinionated, often with bias and often inaccurate. However it is real, and with its flaws it is valued over the voice of the institution.

But how can that 1% voice be a voice you can trust to discuss your brand. How can it be a voice that will help carry influence to make your brand relevant? After all you cannot control it… or can you.

I believe the answer is aggregation. Although you cannot control the conversation you can control what topics you make available to the 90% who are keenly interested in the dialogue. Consider your brand’s attributes, features, and capabilities. Then find, foster, enable and amplify discussions on those brand attributes. By playing host and rounding up that dialogue you are encouraging the 90% to go deeper and identify more strongly with the value proposition of your brand.

Look at sites like Digg, Techmeme and others that do a good job rounding up the dialogue and showing relevant discussions. By rounding up and categorizing the conversations, they are building channels of affinity on key topics. Why not do the same thing for your brand?

Let’s imagine how this could be done with a strong brand, like Dove. Dove aligns its brand with the choice of mothers and their daughters to focus on healthy body images in contrast to the stereotypes historically established in the beauty industry. (My apologies to Dove, if I have their brand positioning wrong, and to clarify I’m just using this brand purely as an example to illustrate my point, any brand could be used) Dove could use aggregation to build on its brand message by finding and publishing relevant dialogues from fast moving opinion leaders who are driving online conversations that foster healthy body images for young girls. This Dove branded destination would ideally be aggregating and republishing the most active discussions on this topic. If done well it should be a magnet for Search, and be a destination for the online audience seeking those discussions.

In addition Dove could add value to the site by fostering community within the aggregation. They could allow members to vote up or down the aggregated content. Dove could host a series of editorial blogs from recognized community members on this site. They could also categorize and group the content along key brand vectors such as; health, self esteem parenting and community. Finally Dove could syndicate this value added community information as a channel of information for other sites.

As Dove aggregates the dialogue and fosters community, the site then becomes a community reflection of the Dove brand. It is the brand, not voiced by the institution, but is instead voiced by the greater online community. It reinforces and markets the Dove brand without Dove having to write a single line of copy.

I believe aggregation by brand marketers is an untapped segment of conversational marketing. So far I’ve only seen media companies come close to doing this. Disney and Nickelodeon/MTV have done a good job building online destination around their brands and often these sites have been turned over to the community. However I’ve yet see a marketing organization really adopt aggregation to help build the content, and I have yet to see a retail product take on this approach.

So what do you think? Can aggregation help your brand? And if you know of a brand that has begun this, I’d love to know more.

Don’t Over Think, Just Do!

Recently I was chatting with Josh Hilliker who is the Community Manager of the vPro Expert Center, and I believe Josh is an example of someone who has figured out how to be successful by not over thinking his community. Josh manages a site that revolves around an IT product. And to be frank it is a product that few understand and who’s value has yet to reach mass appeal. Now here’s the odd thing, Josh’s community kick but over our other communities based on broader appealing products. All logic says his community should reside in the shadow of these communities.

So what’s the deal? What’s Josh got going on the other communities don’t? Simply put Josh just does it. He doesn’t slow down to think whether or not his next idea to engage the community is the right idea. He doesn’t pause on whether he should or should not step out to another site and engage. Josh runs on instinct and expertise that is not encumbered by a need to analyze or perfect what he is doing before he does it.

However it’s not all full speed in every direction. Josh does his research and is grounded in his deep knowledge of his audience and community. He knows where they are online. He knows the conversations that are happening. He also knows that he must often quickly fail before he can succeed. And ultimately he focuses on opportunities not on barriers.

Now in contrast many of our experiences say we should plan out all our activities, consider the risks and establish strategies and tactics that sweat the details. One reason is with traditional publishing you get one shot to make that impression. I see this from folks planning social media activities. They are often focused on identifying and managing the risk, planning traditional content editorial road maps, and high production values that align to brand standards. All efforts that take time and slow the engagement.

With our communities this method has not been successful. One reason is every day is your shot to make that impression, and from one day to the next you may go from a bad place to a good place and back again. It is a fast moving medium and often the best methods are to just do and to stop analyzing. For many folks I know this is a hard concept who have been trained for many years to focus on barriers and to avoid them.

Like an active community, your community managers and strategists must move quickly. Josh quickly secures participation, plans activities and develops content for his community both onsite and offsite. It is as a rapid pace that allows him to be nimble, correct course while also being productive. Traditional marketing tactics that might have you entrenched in plans are just not nimble enough to be effective. While Josh is on his 3rd iteration of new idea, other community managers are still thinking and planning for an initial idea.

So to be successful follow Josh by:

• DO NOT over think plans for your communities and don’t sweat too many details
• DO know your audience, how and where they collaborate online
• DO be and flexibility to throw stuff up, be experimental and iterative
• DO allow for quickly failing and course correction
• DO focus on opportunities over barriers
• DO be nimble, agile and responsive to the community. LISTEN

It just might be the approach you need to get things going

Cheese, mullets, and octopus show us the way

My colleague Kelly Feller posted on Conversations Matter regarding “chips to cheese ratio” when managing a corporate community.  I liked the analogy.  Probably because I had something to do with it, but also interesting to me is a growing list of these colorful new social media terms being floated out there.  Here’s a very short list of some of them.  If you have more please comment and forward.

Chip to cheese ratio:  Nacho cheese analogy that refers to balance in in a corporate community by managing the recipe of chips to cheese to have a tasty site.  Chips being community content and cheese being the subject matter experts from the industry.  When you get too much of a message from the industry the experience is too cheesy, and it drowns the chips.  Not enough cheese and you are lacking rich flavor and context.  Really comes down to active listening.  You need to listen and be responsive to know if you have too little or too much cheese.

Mullet Technology:  This comes from a quote that I believe is sourced from Malcolm in the Middle which describes a mullet as “All business upfront and a party in the back”.  This relates to managing user generated content in a corporate community.  If you worried that user generated content will not compliment your site and might distract from your brand while at the same time you want to embrace the community dialogue, you can deploy “mullet technology”.  This is a technique that will have you expose your corporate blogs and base line community content on your site’s home page,  while you expose the user content including full posts, comments and uploaded photos deeper in the site.

The Enterprise Octopus:  From Sam Lawrence of Jive the Enterprise Octopus is a way to look at collaboration for the enterprise.  The head of the octopus being where people in the organization gather and create community, and the arms of the octopus are the arms that go out and get variety of information the organization needs.  Sam says many companies are headless.  They’ve focused on arms but no central place for people to gather and build equity in their conversations that build a strong community of collaboration.  But just cause you have a place to organize does not mean you have what you need.  You need to tools and resources to get to the information that will feed the company.

 

Is The Writing On The Wall For Search?

This chart is from Alexa and shows how much the web has changed in 2 years.  But I think it tells us much, much more than the speed of the Internet.  I highlighted the social media destinations.  We can see a distinctive shift in the last 2 years from e-commerce to social media in terms of content sites.   Also we see that search is no longer dominating the list, although it does take the top spots.

Social networks are becoming increasingly popular…many of which are not indexed by search.  Lot’s and lots of new activity happening on the web that either isn’t showing up or has lost context in Google.  

Alexa Global Internet Traffic Rankings
2005	2007
yahoo.com	yahoo.com
msn.com	google.com
google.com	Live.com
ebay.com	youtube.com
amazon.com	msn.com
microsoft.com	myspace.com
myspace.com	facebook.com
google.co.uk	wikipedia.org
aol.com	hi5.com
go.com	orkut.com

 
I had a conversation with a colleague regarding the emphasis of search.. in this instance it was regarding research of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, which had a strong requirement on “Search”.  I admit finding things on my company’s intranet is tough and a better search function would be cool.  But I wonder if we have already moved beyond that?

Not sure about the rest of you but the best stuff I find on the web comes to me. I do use Google a lot but I use it less and less.  The relevant stuff comes in a Twitter or shows up on my Facebook home page or even is sent to me in email.   Imagine that kind of functionality in the enterprise.  I’d be able to see the latest governance document from Web Marketing, the latest conversation between Privacy, PR and Legal on transparency, or the most recommended video assets from my colleagues.  All that stuff would be at my finger tips and little search needed.

So my question is, are we starting to see the decline and possibly obsolescence of search as we know it?  By establishing better collaboration tools and linking that content with social networks I can tune into what is relevant to me much easier and it clears up a big part of what I would typically used search for.

The NYTimes has picked up on this per political stories, claiming that people are using traditional media less and less to get their info, but instead using social tools to get their news and pass it on.   And for full disclosure I did not search for this post it was shared with me via a comment in company blog post.

Now I can’t say Search is going away…admittedly there is the occasional argument with my wife on how old celebrity actually is.  And then Google on my iPhone comes to the rescue.  Possibly that is overly stated, but I do believe the use of Search as we know it is declining. 

So as I look at this chart and my own behavior I’m seeing an evolution toward a greater dependence on social tools and less dependency on Search.  I postulate that either Search becomes less relevant or Search will change. 

My bet is on the latter.  There’s evidence Google is all over this.  Open Social will give them hooks to content across multiple social networks. Google indeed may be that thread stitching together all content between you and your friends across the web.

How much order to give your community?

I’m wrestling with this question.  On one side if you organize your community it is clean neat and easy to navigate and you have manageable areas for community managers to focus time and resources,  But on the other if you determine silos for content and restrict topics to what you believe are the most critical for your core audiences, might you be missing a big part of the conversation?

Lately I’ve been thinking a community site needs modest organization, with some free form and organic evolutions driven by the community.  One thing that social media does really well is cater to the long tail of the market.  So as much as you try to organize the site by how you think your audience will want content categorized, you may not be able to  predict exactly who will come and how they will find value in the community site.

Nike has created a terrific community for its Nike Plus product.  They first went about creating a site mostly to allow customers to upload a jogging log.  As a valued added service they loosely organized a modest number of forum topics for this site.  They surprisingly noticed a forum topic on runner challenges far exceeding traffic over the others.  That one topic has now become the focus of the community site.  They could not have predicted this. 

So I wonder how much order and structure should be given to a community site?   How do you balance provide enough structure to manage content and resources to sustain a rich experience of the community while at the same time providing the flexibility to allow the community to shape the weight of not only the conversations and topics but the community itself?