How social media is changing the game for startups

[This post has been originally written for plugged.in which was published on 17th May,2011. You can read the original article here]

Having sold and marketed social media for the past 2 years, I have realized the immense potential in this concept, especially for start-ups, SMEs and fast growing companies. And when I say ‘potential’ I don’t just mean potential as a business model but potential to market better, gain valuable PR, hire smart people and build a great network.

Social media has proved to be the most impactful tool for start-ups and SMEs to compete with bigger players in their markets even with immense marketing resource pressure. The concept that a great idea that can lead to meaningful conversation, will gain attention of people and get them to engage and connect with each other has proven to companies that they no longer need to worry about running after PR agencies, start-up reporters or high marketing costs but gain traction with smart content, engaging ideas and channel presence.

In this post I would like to discuss how some start-ups are solving some of their major challenges like lead generation, building a brand on thought leadership and knowledge creation through social media:

• Lead Generation

I really admire the way Hubspot (a Sequoia and Google Ventures funded inbound marketing company) markets itself. The company has a very active Facebook page that they use very smartly for lead generation. You will see a very good pipe line management by Hubspot where it uses its webinars to bring people to the Facebook page, engages them through conversations about inbound marketing and finally upon ‘liking’ the page, takes them to a lead generation form where presently one can download a webinar on ‘marketing through Facebook’ in exchange of contact information.

I found this type of lead generation tactic more methodological than the more known lead generation tactics through engagement on Twitter and Forums. However if you want to know more about these, here is an interesting article which you can use

• Thoughtleadership

Another  impactful way social media can help start-ups and SMEs to get attention of its target audience and acquire the ‘field expert positioning’ in their mind, is the way it can be used for thought leadership through tools like blogs, webinars, Twitter, Quora and forums etc. David Ogilvy, in his book, ‘Ogilvy on advertising’, mentions that their own advertising campaigns used to be page long articles about teaching other people, how to advertise better. Today social media gives you a publishing platform to do this without an advertising campaign. The reason why start-ups can give a tough fight to established organizations in the thought leadership battle is lack of hierarchies, bubbling passion for the field of work, an easy manageable content flow and social media policy

Adaptive path (a US based user experience design and consulting firm) uses social media very impressively for thoughtleadership. They use their blog (called ‘ideas’) for sharing ideas or topics like experience design, user research, interaction design, game mechanics etc. I see a lot of people blogging in this 40 people company. Their Twitter channel is used for promoting blogs, events and related industry news. Hubspot too uses its marketing blogand inbound marketing community as channels to showcase its thoughtleadership in inbound marketing areas

• Knowledge creation for industry

Gathering knowledge and relevant resources can be a huge time and effort investment for start-ups and small companies. Never the less, certain businesses thrive upon such knowledge and information which are critical for their business

There is an increasing trend by such companies towards open research which is knowledge creation on an open source model. Altimeter group (a research based advisory firm focussing on emerging technologies) has a Social Media Resources wiki where people collaborate on information on social media agencies, consultants in the space, social media boutiques, interactive marketing agencies etc. Daachis Group’s social software wiki is another brilliant effort in this space.

Hope this post would help start-ups in rethinking how they can leverage this fascinating medium for their business better. Do let me know how your company uses social media for promoting its business.

How online cricket communities are connecting fans and driving passion

With IPL being the big news everyday for the past two months, it is great to see how various IPL teams are leveraging the concept of online communities to promote their teams and the game itself. I see almost all of the IPL teams having websites which have community elements where fans can engage around their passion for game and support their teams.

How are these online communities engaging fans?

When I started working in the field of social media, one of the first projects I was exposed to, was an online cricket community of a major IPL team. It was fascinating to see social media as an outstanding tool to connect these fans, get them engaged around this event (IPL) and side-by-side create a huge task force of your team fans and enthusiasts. It made me realize that no other tool or medium can help a team energize its fans, know them better and create a community that will take the burden on promoting the team on its own head!

If you see the overall engagement level on such communities, you will realize that they are doing pretty well. For example Delhi Daredevils has more than 32,000 Facebook fans (I could not find the exact number of members), Rajasthan Royals has more than 4000 discussion threads on its forum and Royal Challenger Bangalore’s online community has generated more than 600,000 support votes for the team from fans.

Hence I thought it might be a good idea to look into how these teams are engaging its fans. Some of these are benchmark practices to be followed by marketing managers for leading their social media marketing initiatives:

• Promoting passion and not product: One of the key things you will notice is that these communities are selling a passion (i.e. cricket) to its users more than a product (the team or tickets). This is important to create consumer activity since people will connect to each other around a passion (or a lifestyle or cause) more than a product.
• Content to create conversations: One can see that the content teams of such communities are actively feeding new content to the users in forms of news, media (photos & videos) and blogs. This is important to increase fan activity and provide triggers to fan engagement. See below how Deccan Chargers and Rajasthan Royals are promoting team and cricket related content on their blogs

• Conversations to generate connect: These communities have built forums and discussion boards to its users to facilitate conversation around news, interesting happenings, developments, upcoming matches. When it comes to cricket, tools like forums are an excellent way to get users to connect around interesting topics. Some teams like King’s XI Punjab and Royal Challengers Bangalore also allow users to create blog posts and articles
• Tactical programs and online campaigns to rejuvenate interest: Your online community is like a social event of which you are the host. You will have to keep on doing interesting programs after short periods of time to rejuvenate the interest. The good thing is that these communities’ managers understand this well and bring periodic contests to pump up the interest of fans. For e.g. for the 2011 season of IPL, you can see Delhi Daredevils running a bunch of microcontest on its contest page, Chennai Super Kings is  managing the Super Blog Contest, Mumbai Indian is running a Chief Fan Contest to recognize the most active community participants and know your Mumbai Indians contest. RCB in the past has run the xyz contest to where they chose a photographer, a fan and a blogger to accompany the team
• Online- offline integration in form of events and meetups: I strongly believe that for a community to succeed, things cannot just remain virtual. You need very strong offline integration with online activity. Online communities like RCB understand this well and facilitate offline meetups and events for fans.
• Bringing celebs to the fans: Such communities bridge the barriers between the celeb team players and the fans by bringing news, interview, exclusive write-ups to the fans

How are such communities promoting the game and the brand?

Needless to say, such communities are an immense asset to the game of cricket. It is adding an additional online layer to the excitement that thrives in cricket stadiums, beer bars, car radios and in front of television sets in homes. But the interesting thing to note is the way it is helping out in revenue generation and brand building initiatives of the teams’ parent brand.

Leaving aside the obvious eyeballs grabbing and focussed banner and branding opportunities that such communities bring (for e.g. see the bottom of the Kolkata Knight Rider website), such communities are helping brand sell merchandize, tickets and premium memberships too. But the most important asset such communities are bringing to the brand is that they are providing a round the year platform to engage the audience rather than the IPL event which generates buzz for at most a quarter. For e.g Royal Challenger brand would get a 12 month buzz, attention and user activity from its online community as compared to a season long buzz and attention generated by offline campaigns.

Hope this post would help marketing managers understand a particular use case of online communities and the value they bring to the brand.

The emergence of event based communities

[I wrote this post originally for Kuliza's ZaGarage blog. You can see the original post here.]

Background

Offline events have always been a great fit for online community creation, for one - events are themselves a social engagement and connecting visitors online before or after the event happens makes sense. Secondly, some of the events are built around passions (like Academy Awards, Super Bowl etc) and it is valuable to connect people around these passions not just to promote the event but to promote the passion itself.

Sometime back I got the chance to look into SXSW's (the mega music, film and interactive fest that happened in the month of march) event networking community, which is a closed network of people who are attending the event. I found the community an interesting way to connect people and facilitate networking before they actually attend the event making it a more valuable connect model for those who see a great potential in the event to meet interesting people. Some of the other interesting features included your personal network integration (like on Facebook / Twitter) with the platform so that you can see who other people in you network are attending SXSW. You can see a few snapshots below: (thse actually belong to @ksarda who kindly gave me access to this closed network)

Why an online community is a great idea?

Like SXSW, I am seeing an increasing preference for brands, PR  companies and event management companies towards such event based social networks and communities. Brands are reaching out to white label social networks products or getting custom communities built specific for their event. The reasons in my mind for such rising inclination are:

1. Event promotion: Since they show the buzz being generate around event, interest of other people in the event
2. Increase event longevity: Event based communities start generating buzz around the event, conversations around the topic, even before the event and provide a platform for continued discussions after the event has ended.
3. Valuable information: Brand get to know who are the evangelists around the topics they want to attach themselves. They come to know about supporters to the concept of the event, something no other medium can tell them
4. Increase in event interaction: Such communities not only help in increasing numbers to the event but also help improve the overall event quality. It connects people around a particular interest (the one around which the event is based) and engages them in conversations and this makes the meetings at the actual event more fruitful. Overall this turns out to be a very impactful model.

What are the interesting communities in this space?

In my research I have come across 3 types of event based online communities. They are:

1. Communities for small and large events built over white label platforms (e.g.Esomar Congress 2009 event community)
2. Custom built communities around events (e.g. sxsw 2011)
3. Communities of passion built around events (e.g. grammy )

To begin with, there are many players in the white label platform market whose services you can use for building a community around your event. Crowdvine (that powered UX 2010 Week and Esomar Congress 2009) and Pathable (that powered World Education Congress 2010) are few of the companies that specialize in building event based online communities. Some other companies have platforms which can be customized, grown and moulded according to your needs like Qontext, which powered SugarCon Community (btw I loved this platform for their clean UI) and Ning that powered the unofficial sxsw insider guide. These platforms contain all the required features to build an event based network like people profile, discussions, news, networking tools, rich media, blogs etc.

Whether you would want a community on an already existing white label platform or you would like to build your own from scratch, like sxsw 2011, depends on what you want the community for. If the purpose of the community is to facilitate networking, build a conversation platform around the theme of the event which can be sustained even after the event gets over, you should be fine with such white label platforms. But if you want a deep integration of user interface with your existing website (i.e. if you want the look and feel of you community exactly like your existing website) you might prefer a custom built community. The problem with a lot of white label platforms is that all communities end up looking the same. Similarly many white label platforms only allow integration with a certain set of plugins and hence if you want something very specific (like running a contest around your event or integration with the event registration site) you would need services to customize these platforms or build one from scratch.

However there is a certain set of event based networks that instead of promoting the event, focus on promoting the passion around the event. Here the focus shifts from networking to connecting around passion. If you see the Grammy website or the NFL website the highlight is vis -a- vis music and football rather than the event. But research shows that such a promotion of passion has been highly impactful in increasing the viewership of the event.

What works in event based communities -what are the important questions you need to ask before planning a event based community

1. What is the key objective: Is it event promotion though networking, thought leadership, video campaign, contest, referral campaign or connecting people around their interest
2. How long do you want it: Is the community planned to cease after the event or you want to sustain it for loner. In fact you might even want to build a community that can add upon it's network event after event and operates round the year. In such case the community has to be built around something bigger than the event itself (like a lifestyle, passion or cause and events appear as campaign to energize the community)
3. Which tools do you need: Are the tools and platforms of your choice facilitating your objectives.

Hope this discussion was fruitful in helping you out in your online community decision for your event. Comments, feedback and added research are most welcome.

[ This research will be a part of the social technology quarterly by Kuliza which we plan to publish by end of this quarter. Also I would like to take this opportunity to add here that Kuliza helps companies build user communities and Facebook apps through it's ZaSocial offerings. ]

Gamifying thought leadership

In my previous blog I had talked about how internal company culture can support companies B2B branding efforts such as thought leadership and creating internal brands. There I had also talked about the key role of employees in creating thought leader positioning of the company and without the help of its people, a B2B services brand will be helpless in communicating it's thought leadership and field expertise.

However, creating such thought leadership practices are easier said than done and many marketing and brand manager struggle in getting their employees to have an active presence on thought leadership channels like research blogs, conferences, webinars, research papers, guest articles and lectures etc. If you are one such person, this blog post is for you.

In this blog post I will focus on how some simple principles of game mechanics can be used to motivate people in your company to help you in your thought leadership and how we plan to do it in Kuliza. Now I don't think a lot about gamification but 2 people at Kuliza,@ksarda & @diarmaidb do, and I would like to thank them for helping me structure this. This initiative is part of my continued effort at Kuliza to integrate culture into marketing and provide a joint branding effort.

Why 'gamify' thoughtleadership?

For one, gamification of processes is an excellent way of positively reinforcing people and motivating them in a fun, non corporate way. They get a reason to be active and to move up. Secondly, if you ask people to take out time to document their research, participate or speak at meetups etc, these things might appear as a hassle to them. You gamify the process, attach level and tasks on the ladder and give them the full picture of where they can reach - they will see more value in these initiatives. Thirdly, gamification attaches reputation and recognition to performance and contribution. This helps you know, who are the key thought leaders in the company, who are the most enthusiastic people, who are the best bloggers, frequent speakers etc. Finally, gamification helps us break a large process into pieces (levels) and focus on one piece at a time. For e.g. at Kuliza we recognized more than 10 channels for communicating thoughtleadership (see diagram below) but helping everybody in all 10 would be a difficult task. By gamifying this process, we know what is each person's maturity and hence where should be the focus.

How to gamify thoughtleadership? Here are some of our thoughts:

a) Build the arena:

Define the objectives that you want to achieve  through thoughtleadership. In our case, since we are incepting these practices for the first time, we have kept a focus on various channels, where we want to establish presence. Hence we identified around 10 channels.

b) Level'em up!

Attach these objectives on the thought leadership ladder. It is important to decide the total number of levels on the ladder.Having too many would make the game look difficult to win and having too less will make crossing each level too tough. Also the easier objectives need to be attached to the lower levels of the ladder than the difficult ones. At Kuliza, we also took care that the initial stages not only have easier objectives but also can be completed faster. (finally something valuable was achieved from the hours that went into playingsuper mario)

3) 'Points' to be noted

One you know the objectives of each level, you need to associate points achieved upon completion of a task (or a microtask) and here the creative bug can lead the way. For example, in our game, each level is divided into tasks. The players (employees) get points for doing task (like participating in meetups, forums at lower level to writing case studies, reports, guest columns at higher levels). To complete a level you need to achieve a total number of points and a minimum number of points for each task.

Finally there are booster points for producing content of extraordinary quality, moving fast on the ladder, etc and badges/ rewards for achievements like clearing a level, being the first to clear a level among other, being rank one consistently in a quarter etc.

4) Rules of the game:

Finally you need to think of the loopholes in the game and come up with set of simple rules to be fair and just to all, and keep the motivation level up. Like, everybody starts from zero, even if here might already be active on 5 of the 10 channels. Only quality content is counted and goes up on the channels and nobody should write just for the sake of moving up the ladder.

What comes up is an awesome (but simple) picture of this wonderful game!

However there are certain issues we need to fix and we know this game is not perfect as of now. It lacks challenges in between levels, which are a key part of game mechanics; we need to refine tasks at higher level , think a bit more on booster points. All said, but one thing is sure, this is going to be fun! Once again, comments and feedback are welcome on our ideas.