In my last blog, I talked about the similarities between social media communities and snowballs. This time I’d like to talk about a couple of ways of getting the “snowball effect” started in a community.
To begin with: think like a casino. If you’ve ever been to Las Vegas (or anywhere casinos have gaming tables) you’ll notice that there is rarely just one player at a blackjack table. Even if there is a dealer standing by at the ready, most players don’t want to sit down at an empty table and play one-on-one against the house. It’s more fun (and some would say you have better odds) if you are playing blackjack with other people at the table, so new players tend to gravitate to tables that already have a few players. So how do casinos draw in players during slow periods? Shills. Players, paid by the casino, sit at empty or slow tables so that they look busy. Busy tables attract other players so they become more busy, attracting more players, and so on until the table is full. Social media communities can also employ this strategy: while they are small, the organization that owns the community can discretely insert members who are paid to hang out, post comments, encourage other members, contribute representative content, etc. Of course, you have to be careful to make this a discrete activity: if other members *know* that the shills are there, they might be discouraged from participation.
Another way to attract participants is to offer some sort of reward for participation in key areas of the community. The reward can be an actual monetary award (or some kind of prize with actual value in the real world) or some sort of perceived award (like Foursquare “badges,” for instance, that may be worth nothing more than bragging rights). Ideally, you would like to have the community members vote for and select the winning content, but the organization can reward desired behavior just as easily. I had some moderate success with just such a strategy long before the concept of social media crowdsourcing: my company ran a snarky website making fun of stupid things said about the Y2K problem, and generated a ton of email submissions by giving out a small prize each month (of course, the site had limited usefulness after the 1990’s).
Another idea I saw recently was a kind of real-world scavenger hunt leveraging people’s natural curiosity. QR codes were posted without explanation in strategic areas where potential members of the social community tended to hang out in the real world. Those QR codes, scanned into a mobile phone, directed curious visitors to an online community. Visitors there got an explanation of the contest, the rules, and clues to locations of other QR code postings to go hunt down. Winners got recognition on the web site and a small prize, but I thought it was a great way to show new people the site and to get people who were already registered to visit portions of the site they might not otherwise know about. Done correctly, this strategy has the potential to be a success online and offline: the scavenger hunt could increase traffic at sponsor locations *and* generate traffic (and members) online.
There are lots of other strategies that might be employed to market the site, and I’ll pass along interesting ones in future blog postings. One thing we know for certain is that the “Field of Dreams” strategy—“build it and they will come”—doesn’t work.
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