What community do newspapers create?

This article in Techdirt on newspaper funding raises the very real issue that other commentators have made before. The demise of ad revenues on newspaper websites is not down to the lack of advertisers, its down to the reason why advertisers would want to advertise on these sites.

Its not enough these days to provide hundreds of pages of content with adverts and hope you sell all the spaces crested. In fact, as I've mentioned before, some newspapers realise this and are even reducing their inventory.

So what does make a site valuable enough for advertisers to want to spend money on them?

1. Relevant content
But does this have to be an exact version of what I read on the train this morning? Why can't you include links in all your online articles to your sources or provide more supporting information than you currently do, so that you couldn't fit into your 100 word print-version? What about the additional articles that you wrote but couldn't get submitted by the deadline - but are still really useful?
Also, what about making the content more relevant by allowing proper personalisation and customisation (such as the Google news page). You could also consider adding useful tools and relevant interactive features & functionality. And don't get me started on channel relevance....

2. Engaging
You build a stronger connection with your audience/readership, by allowing them to engage. This isn't that difficult and you don't need that latest fancy disucssion board or chat tool, you just need to facilitate dialogue between yourselves and your users.
BTW: you also need to allow this to happen between themselves if you are after creating a community worth joining.
For a good example of this I point people at http://www.theregister.co.uk . This IT news site has a decent range of articles published throughout the day and often goes into significant detailed investigation of key technology issues. It also provides and invites discussion on each of its articles and generates a decent community around subjects and writers, without alienating the one-off commenter.

The question to ask therefore is... if The Register and similar reporters as Steve Rubel highlights here have manged to do this? Why don't the others stop trying to convince everyone that their traditonal business model still works and learn a newer trick or two?

graphing online communities

I've mentioned several times that companies need to understand and even visual their Corporate Social Graph. However, how would you go-about visually reprsenting an online social network or community?

Those clever people over at Orgnet think they have the answer:
http://www.orgnet.com/community.html

This diagram, looking more like a scientific / physics experiment, depicts three different ringed regions of blue, green and red nodes. This work (termed the 'field of social network analysis') also offers some useful insight about the connectivity of users

Node counts are important in social networks, but it's the relationships -- and the patterns they create -- that are key

Insightful stuff! If you want to get further insight, you'd better read the blog of Valdis Krebs (the Founder and Chief Scientist at orgnet.com) at
http://www.thenetworkthinker.com/

Building branded communities... why not?

I'm still pleasantly suprised that the "buy or build" conversation comes up so much in relation to social media web functionality. But, I guess its good that potential clients are still asking what's involved in developing their own offering, despite the availability of so many white cost-effective white-label and hosted solutions.

But what do you do when you build it and they don't come? What if there is no Field of Dreams?

I had this recently when a start-up I know built a community part of its website and nobody used it. My first question to ask is "what were you expecting?". You wouldn't produce a product and not advertise it. Somehow they thought that a site would instantly create evangelic users who would encourage thousands of others, whilst instantly appearing top in Google of all keywords. (How I laughed... when I walked out of the room)

Then there's the case that visitors come, look around and disappear. Why? Well they don't find anything of interest! Either your navigation or search doesn't let them find what they want.. or worse still... your community isn't.. errrr... communicating correctly.

The worst thing happens is when brands ignore existing communities and try to set up their own in competition. .Partly through ignorance and partly from arrogance, this is commerical madness and will potentially see companies throw money at something they need not do. It may also create confusion and fragment conversations, making tracking & measurement harder.

So next time your CMO walks over and says something like "we need to build a community", forget what you see in films.

Blogging issues

Blogging and other social media has created its own issues for individuals:
http://onlinejournalismblog.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/seven-psychological-complaints-of-bloggers-and-social-media-addicts/

But as if that wasn't enought to worry about... once you've built a community, keeping them is your next priority:
http://newswireblog.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/building-an-online-community-part-two-the-problems/

Note: 3 posts in one day, that's got to give me a complex about something....

Engaging with a Community - some guidelines

Sean O'Driscoll in a recent blog posting, has given some very useful guidelines on how to manage an online community and how this needs to be a mind-set change with the orgainisation first.
http://communitygrouptherapy.com/2008/04/26/some-things-to-do-and-not-do/

This does raise an important question about how much you restrict your community manager (and this applies to bloggers, social media participants, etc.)

Collective endorsement

Alastair Duncan has recently used the term 'Collective Endosement' in his blog posting 'Communities are the future' and I think it is a very well chosen phrase. It sums up how specific groups bonded by a shared sentiment (and not necessarily geography) flock around a particular idea.

Alastair also poses the question:

"Will communities be the dictators of content in the future?"

and he asks if these communities could gatekeeper the outcome by this collective endorsement.

I'd like to take this idea a little further and state that I don't believe it will be entire communities that will control this sentiment all the time and that key influencers within these communities will often lead the collective embrace (or attack).

However, unlike the concept of The Tipping Point, where these are super-influencial social magnets.... these people could be normal, everyday people. The downside is that it therefore makes it far harder to understand the dynamics involved and plan your influencing strategy accordingly.