A Q&A about developing online communities . . .
Mark Hopkins is editor of the tech blog siliconANGLE and the former editor of the social networking blog Mashable. He has built the online communities for Mashable, blipmedia, 5Tribe and Intel.
Q: From the time you were associate editor at Mashable to now running siliconANGLE, you’ve followed social media technologies very closely. How have tools like Twitter made bloggers’ voices so much more powerful?
A: Twitter has been a great equalizer for content producers, making individuals the ultimate wielders of the power, as opposed to the larger organizations. Twitter became a ‘thing’ for content producers during my tenure at Mashable. When I signed up for the service, I was the only guy at Mashable utilizing it, and quickly became the one with the largest social graph. I had caught a tweet from Marshall Kirkpatrick stating that the last few scoops he blogged had come from Twitter, so that made me start paying better attention to it.
Interacting with others and syndicating my Mashable and personal blog posts to the service gave me an edge up against the other users in terms of capturing attention and engagement that they didn’t have, which is what ended up getting Pete to start looking into utilizing it for the blog. The end of the story, obviously, is that Mashable is getting a large majority of their site’s considerable traffic from Twitter retweets now, and when they look for new talent, they set minimums to the size of the social graph on Twitter a potential contributor has before they’ll even consider their other qualifications.
The bonus is, though, that after I left the company, I was able to take my readers with me. Part of the meteoric growth of siliconANGLE has been due to my readers following me from place to place. I rarely update my personal blog these days, but whenever I do, I simply need to tweet that a new post is up, and my traffic returns to pre-staleness levels. In other words, people are paying attention to me, and where I put my thoughts (in terms of what site those thoughts reside on) is more or less inconsequential as compared to the fact that I’ve said something.
Q: So many big companies set up a company blog or a community and then fail. What has to be set up in place in order for these to succeed?
A: This is a tough question – mostly because it depends on the type of engagement you’re trying to encourage, and what sort of clout the company has coming into the game.
In most cases, though, there are three parts that need to be available for engagement to happen:
Fire needs oxygen, heat source or ignition, and fuel to burn.
For engagement, you need conflict, utility and people. This is a gross simplification, but the metaphor maps pretty well to the fire pyramid.
Conflict doesn’t need to be as negative as it sounds. Something for people to quibble with, clarify or ask questions about can qualify as conflict. If a blog post is too complete or authoritative, there is no reason for a member of the audience to interact, though they may pass it on to their friends. There’s a fine art to being less persuasive than you can possibly be without being disingenuous. It’s best to regard a blog post as a game of chess (or checkers, if you will). Leave some ammunition in your persuasive argument to fire off in the comments when you interact with the readers. It gives you more talking points, and lets the audience know that you’re available to interact with.
Utility is simple and complex at the same time. By utility, I mean the tools of the trade — blogs, microblogging, Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, et. al. You shouldn’t expect to engage on all social platforms for all blog posts. Not only is it unrealistic, but it’s inappropriate. Each tool carries it’s own set of cultures and memes, and not every message you may have is appropriate for all tool sets. It is, though, important to engage on utilities and communities outside your own because the biggest reason your corporate blog is failing to engage is that you’re hoping that the community comes to you . . . which brings me to people.
If you’re just launching a blog, you have no people. There are dozens of tricks to getting more folks to your site, but you must engage a few of them at least to start, because everyone begins with zero audience. If you’re not syndicating your content to outside communities, you’ll never be discovered in a significant way. Engagement, by definition, requires there be more than one person. Go out and find them, and if you have the other elements to your content I’ve described, engagement will follow.
Q: Corporate culture dictates that marketing efforts should have tangible ROI. What advice would you give to a CMO struggling to convince higher-ups that monitoring and participating in the online space has tangible benefits in the end?
A: Every audience member who engages your online content is a monetizable lead. If you’re a marketer that’s been around Internet technology for five to ten years, you remember opt-in email lists. Engagement is the new opt-in list.
Engage the same audience member enough times, and they are considered part of your community. It’s important to have the tools in your social media presence to hook them in meaningfully, be that a discussion group, community driven Web site, or niche brand social network – because that’s the path to ROI on your social media content. Simply having a successful blog is half the battle — if your strategy ends there, you will never see tangible ROI from your efforts, even if it benefits your brand and company in largely intangible ways.
Aside from leading your audience into becoming registered fans of your company, there are dozens of intangible benefits that large companies spend millions and billions of dollars a year to achieve through traditional media that can be achieved through thousands of dollars a year with social media — including branding, evangelism, customer service as marketing, and technical support as marketing.
This is something siliconANGLE is attempting to do with a number of large Silicon Valley brands in the chipset and networking arena — taking what are essentially lifeless technical support forums for devices and software development packages, and turning them into thriving communities for interaction, thought development and leadership, and brand representation.
Q: How quickly has social media technology evolved just in the past five years?
A: By leaps and bounds. The social media mojo (as you put it) that I have now would not have been realistically achievable for me five years ago. Tools like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook create ecosystems of people who actually care what I have to say for whatever reason (be they connected to me geographically, topically, or by relationship) that I can syndicate my content to.
Five years ago, finding audience was a hit or miss situation where you must explore manually the blogosphere by topic or region and hope you could usurp some of their audience as your own.
These days, it’s as easy as interacting with people, regardless of their influence or station, and letting the merits of your ideas capture them.
Q: How can large companies evolve technologically so that someone monitoring the social media space can communicate effectively with other team members to solve problems presented in the social media sphere?
A: Much of the top tier social media and public relations consulting firms counsel their clients on what is essentially (in netspeak, anyway), a strategy of lurking . . . that is to say, “just listen.”
Listening is only part of the equation. Tools used for mining the social media ecosystem for useful data are great, but they’re nothing if you take no action on them. The biggest technological step a company can take is to shift, psychologically, their attitude towards these reports. Useful data isn’t useful unless you use it. Develop strategies to engage those speaking up about your brand or about the ideas useful to your company, and create a net to capture those folks in, be it a blog, community site, discussion group or other social media tool that allows one easy access to those folks again.
Engagement is the new opt-in, and understanding that is 80 percent of the battle. Once you get that and understand the machinations of the various utilities in the social media toolbox, the path to ROI becomes obvious.
Michelle Greer is a Web marketing strategist/geek in Austin, Texas. Case studies of her work have been featured in Mashable, Yahoo News, O’Reilly Radar, and the Austin American Statesman. You can find her tips on marketing and social media at michellesblog.net.
