Birth of Online Communities, tipping point etc.

Taking forward my previous post on online communities. Just going through the ways some of the bigger community birth to tipping point.

When we go through the history of how a lot of these communities were born, we will find something interesting. Listing down the stuff on some of the ones which I classified in the last post.

Going through this list of things, there is one common thing which we see, its that the biggest online communities in the world were born out of a personal need or hobby projects or just by chance. None of them actually was out of some VC sitting in silicon valley butchering down ideas and business models to carve out the perfect way to make money. There is one important factor in all of these things, its bringing about the “Stickiness Factor” for the people to stay on the page. Every entrepreneur around the world is trying to find that one stickiness factor that can build this community.

Some of the things which needs to be looked while building a community:

• Putting the members first – Don’t listen to VC’s 🙂
• Find ways to use the first mover advantage
• Try to understand what really causes the network effect for your community
• Start off with very less features, because people may not really be in your community for the feature. ie. the feature may not really be the “Stickiness Factor”
• Keeping talking to your community, leverage the power. Engage with them at a 1-to-1 level of communication

Hopefully made some sense.

Defining Online Communities

I had a very interesting session on building online communities last week, with loads of learnings.

I will be covering each of stuff in the upcoming posts: Planning to roughly divide them in the following structure:

1. Defining an online community
2. Growing and Reaching the tipping point
3. Maturity and the eBay diffusion model

All these have been taken from various materials shared by our Prof. David   at IE. The discussion was predominantly around eBay as David was the Head of eBay Europe so we did get a lot of dope on its success and how they managed the communities.

We had discussions on the following communities:

Wikipedia, Digg, Youtube,eBay, Paypal, Threadless , Skype, Yahoo Messenger,

Napster, Skype, Vuze, Myspace, Facebook

We divided all the above in the following framework as shown, but as we head towards a social commerce era, we are seeing the communities trying to get out of its key stickiness factor and do what other also do.

Is that the way to go for social communities, where they act as the supermarket for all community interactions. May be. May be not.

I will take up each of them separately over the next 2-3 weeks to put in something of my own.

Threadless.com – Participate, Shop and have fun

Its been sometime since my last post, been busy with loads of assignments at IE and work stuff eating the rest of my time.

Here is something interesting for companies who are really wondering on things to do to build a community. This example is of threadleass.com- a tshirt company. If you are wondering what a tshirt company is doing in a digital marketing blog, its simply because they made a $30 Million without an investor backing, and used the web as a sourcing partner.  A model which everyone talks a lot about- Crowdsourcing.

The slide share presentation would give you a better idea on what I am talking about:

The second last slide talks about why this company came out to be special for me:

• Its not just Web 2.0 where ppl talk a lot just about technology and stuff
• More than a community – Its about creating a Fan base!
• Engaging and Playful – Great promotions , Great brand engagement tactics
• Its big business $$ – $30 Million without any of those VC’s to harass you
• Quality – Good communication to customers, asking right questions for better stock management
• No big investor backing! – Ya I keep saying this.
• No Harvard guys in here

If you found it interesting, do mention it somewhere in your community 🙂

BTW expect a lot more postings, as I got a summer break at IE right now from this friday on. Happy Sharing.

Dove Campaign for Beauty – a 59’ Slide Cast

As a part of the course, I was working on a 59 second podcast on a successful Viral Marketing Campaign. Chose the Dove Campaign for Beauty.

Some of the things that struck me about this “Successful” campaign:

• Very High views for videos over 2 million per video but fewer ratings, only around 0.1% of viewers rated the videos
• Youtube videos were not managed by the unilever team!
• No Social media connect at all
• Loads of sporadic groups not maintained properly in Facebook,
• The green peace organization video was simple awesome, think this was more successful – it got Unilever to take action in April 2008 on the palm oil usage by the company

Dove Onslaught by Green Peace Organization

Well, I thought using the Slidecast feature in Slideshare would be a good idea, and yes it indeed was.

Here is my first Slidecast:

Viral Marketing Campaigns

View more OpenOffice presentations from Rahul Nambiar.

Everyone should try the slide cast feature, it is fun and easy.

PS:Did not spend a lot of time on synchronization but the tool works really well. Wish I had a better Microphone to record, may be next time 🙂

Findability in Websites – Extracts from our Podcast

Its been sometime since I have updated this space. Thought will post the group podcast which we worked on for our last session of Campaign Management. These key point to be covered in the 3-4 min podcast was “How would you make it easy for user to find what they are looking for (or even discover new things)?”

Some Excerpts from the Podcast:

According to Adobe’s latest report on creating rich online experience there are few factors in the website creation that must be observed:

• Firstly, Content is a king – a picture is worth a thousand words. Isn’t it great to find the things you need right away, to visualize them and hit the “checkout” button? (Example: www.houseoffraser.co.uk)
• Secondly, Search is getting sexier and browsing, too – Do you guys, browse the directories in Amazon.com all the time or you are mostly using the search module typing the entries you are looking for? But imagine if you are looking for bridal gowns. Wouldn’t it be a requirement for you to have detail zooms or even videos of the gown worn by a model?
• Thirdly, Navigation when you need it – Let the content drive the navigation. After all, what you are selling is the item and navigation is only enhancing the experience of the user. (Example: www.nikeid.nike.com)
• Fourthly, Shopping is becoming social – Isn’t it all about sharing experiences, observations and opinions? And how do you tempt the user to buy when the hand cannot “touch and feel”. (Example: iTunes podcasting section)
• And finally, Personalization is the key to making things findable in the website – It’s always the so easy when the website throws up only the stuff which the user wants to see and in some cases it happens automatically.

If you were in charge of the business website, what steps would you take in order to attract customers and faster transactions? Would you be heading for simplicity or betting on search + discovery?

Remember, the consumers are an impatient lot and if they don’t get what they are looking for easily enough – Your competitor is just a click away.

PS: Here is the link for the complete podcast http://campaignmanagement.podbean.com/ and thats my friend Borislav’s voice :), check out his photo blog you will find some really good clicks from all the places he has been to – China, Russia, Bulgaria and of course Madrid!