Community marketing versus conventional marketing
Paul Fabretti
recently where I ended up turning down a job offer.
The simple facts are that the company needed 1000 registrants to their
website per month to enable them to turn a small percentage of those
people into overseas property sales.
Downside: If I fell below the 1000 mark at any time over a 3 month
trial period I was gone. Outta the door!
Confident that some of the conventional methods would bring in a decent
chunk of interest (and therefore registrants) I was also keen to try a
bit of "Web 2.0" build and integrate communities, blog etc., and
generally work along the Pinko philosophy.
But, knowing their desperation for results and the time it would take
to build/integrate a community I turned the job down.
What are your experiences/thoughts about [a] this sort of cut-throat
marketing approach and [b] your experiences about community being able
to decent level a decent ROI (sorry for bringing such as dirty word to
the group!!) to satisfy the number crunchers.
Or...are the two never going to work for some time to come?
Tara, did this conflict have something to do with your leaving Riya?
(Not fishing for goss here, but I can't help thinking that there is
some crossover).
Francois Gossieaux
I would have turned that job down as well...personally I do not believe that
there should be room in business for this kind of "marketing."
As John Hagel (www.johnhagel.com) says, communities will never work unless
ROI comes to mean "return on information" - which goes both ways. You have
to ensure that there is a clear return of information for the community
participants as well as for the community manager. I did summarize his
thoughts on my blog
(http://www.emergencemarketing.com/archives/2006/08/mastering_the_new_market
i.php).
My 2c.
Francois
Paul Fabretti
You make a good point, although I can't help thinking with my
traditional head on that there must be some way of being able to
measure the effectiveness of communities which is why I am so keen to
read about Tara's take on measurement of communities on the CA blog.
A+
Citizen Rogue
It's so frustrating to see these companies continually thinking that they can just keep shoving a product down people's throats without giving anything back in return.
Alright, yes...the measurements thing. I know that I'm all, like, eff ROI...but at the end of the day, we need to understand a bit of what is happening...to learn from our mistakes and victories. When we talk about Measurements, we aren't talking about numbers...it will be more of a qualifiable result. How do you measure happiness? Well, it's not totally solvable, but there are clear indications of happiness: health improves, smiles more, doesn't require as much outside feedback, acts more social, etc. And these differ from person to person, as do the 'inputs' ie. what makes one happy: love, money, prestige, security, simplicity, etc. I think community health works similarly. It definitely isn't a one-size-fits-all scenario and numbers don't indicate health. Hell, the Microsoft devnet has oodles of people, but most of them are out for their own benefit. Is that healthy? Well, it helps Microsoft to a certain point, but it's pretty unstable.
We are putting together a series of case studies with various different communities to try and figure out all of those nuances that make 'healthy' vs. 'unhealthy' - we started with Microformats vs. Structured Blogging:
http://www.horsepigcow.com/2006/10/discussion-when-community-doesnt.html
Although it was a very brief overview without much deep research. Mostly, it was anecdotal. I want to find out all of the steps taken, anecdotes from the various members and take a look at how things were rolled out.
I believe this will be very useful for us Pinkos...moving beyond the militant and into the actionable realm. If we want to explode marketing notions from the inside, there has to be a way to speak in a language that bridges rather than polarizes. I'm not talking about compromising, either. ;)
Does this make more sense?
Tara
tara 'miss rogue' hunt
agent provocateur
Citizen Agency (www.citizenagency.com)
blog: www.horsepigcow.com
phone: 415-694-1951
fax: 415-727-5335
Paul Fabretti
head. If we can find a way to measure subjective activity then there is
a clear argument about to take to the non-believers.
One thought I had was using the inclusion of smilies and other
characters in forums for example.
I am sure there is some way of measuring the use of stuff like that,
the frequency of their use in relation to brand keywords in order to
find associations and frequencies of terms and symbols of
satisfaction/anger/happiness etc.