Building the Comunity Product

iPhone launch clearly showed in the few months that have passed, the power of the community in spreading the word and keeping the topic hot. Even mediocre blog entries, regardless of them being favorable to the product or not, got a lot of visits and social networking sites had days of “iPhone-related only” topics on their front page, and all that from “thunderlizards”, self-appointed evangelists and bloggers that looked for some traffic for their Ad-Sense supported pages.
On the other hand, buzz building does not generate awareness. So what made all these people get involved and build an open community? They found something worthy of building a community around it. It’s tough to impossible to build a community around mundane and mediocre products regardless of the amount of money or marketing minds you throw at it. If the product is worth a community it will get one no matter how hard you try to stop it from forming.
Is a great product enough though? Well, you may have the website that puts Flickr to shame but Google Analytics shows 0 visitors. What you need is a platoon of thunderlizards, right away. You need to be proactive about the community and stir the waters a bit and help form the nucleus and to do that, you need to decide to build Closed or Open communities. Nike owns a community; you may choose football players and have a virtual championship, as long as they’re Nike players. An open community is built on self-appointed evangelists though and if you can’t have such a community forming, it’s time to review the product.
You can build the product for the community and have the community be the product. That is an amazing concept so beautifully built by Treadless. Just check them out; they have built the perfect community product.
Social media is art about context, communication and collaboration so you have to recruit your evangelists right away and have them build the nucleus of a community around you and suggest and encourage people to further spread the word by blogging and commenting. Just asking your customers for help is so flattering that they will help you, much to your surprise.
All right, where to find these evangelists? All great deeds need a champion that inspires and shapes the world. All you need is to be or find and assign that champion, that original hero that gives the community identity and inspiration. What employee wakes up in the morning thinking: “Today I will carry the flag for my company on the virtual world”? Would they be thinking: “I might get fired for my comment yesterday on that blog post”?
The community has to welcome criticism as this is a long term relationship with ups and downs. Luckily, the criticism the community gives the product or the company is always a constructive one. You should fear no criticism as that means people are going away and they usually never return. Freaking out and trying to control the community as soon as something not-so-nice comes up, just kills it. Love letters from the community to the owner of the company are just a myth.
For your product to attract and foster a community on its own it needs flexibility, malleability, extensibility, it needs to be able to grow by having others build on it. It needs and SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows widgets, plug-ins, tuning. The community needs build on and that flatters the community as admits that you did not build the perfect product, but it can get there sure enough. Once someone builds a widget, a plug-in for your product just try to take your product away from that person. A community may as well start building around the plug-in. As long as tweaking is possible, someone will try it and make it great in a way you never thought of.
Participate in the exchange. The community does not run the company but it has a voice and it needs answers from within the company. The involvement of the CEO in the conversation is a bit extreme for a large company though. Participation in the conversation also means you make sure the community is easy to reach and included in your operations. Just search for forums, “user groups” or blogs at Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, Yahoo, Sun or Ford, Harley Davidson, Shell …
For all that happened, Apple deserves a Hight Five on building a community product.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

• Obsolete computer museum
• Memepool
• Simply Audiobooks

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Sites that you don't stumbe upon in your every day surfing. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.
And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Guerilla Marketing
2. Webmaster Radio
3. iMusic

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

MySpace .. YouTube, the real transformers of the web

The web is only 15 years old and it transformed the world. The first website, ever, was published in late 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and has been preserved for the future by W3C and you can see a copy of it here.
Since then, websites have changed the world and now they’re changing the web again. Yahoo and AOL did portals, and they did them so well that they practically killed the competition until technology allowed for something like Google and Blogger to arrive. But before Blogger and with the right message, MySpace and YouTube have changed the way younger generation thinks about the internet. I remember a beer’s slogan “your friends know why” put that beer on top of the list in Eastern Europe for years and MySpace “a place for friends” has the same impact in cyberspace. YouTube generated a video community so well that members lived every transformation of it with passion.
A quote from News Corp. CEO Peter Chernin : “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace.”. Read it all in We Don’t Need Web 2.0 and see that he might be right as they’re actually leading the Web 2.0 revolution.
The way the internet is evolving is by putting you at the center and bringing you the world, the way you like it. The emphasis is, finally, on beauty and usability, and sees the impact it has on everything else and on you as well. The best article I came across on the changes the web is seeing is written by Michael Rogers and he’s asking: Can Web 2.0 change the world?. I’m saying yes and MySpace and YouTube are the real transformers as they changed with a swift move, the way we think about it.

Here is but a list of sites that have changed my world:
· eBay.com - the auction and shopping site
· wikipedia.com. - encyclopaedia
· napster.com, the music file sharing website, this shook some ground
· youtube.com. the video-sharing network
· blogger.com, Blog publishing system and the following myspace.com, amazon.com, slashdot.org, digg.com, flickr.com, photobucket.com that came with the same wave. And I’m only mentioning a few.

The web is now a space for interactivity, sharp and clean WebPages with bold and simple designs centered in your browser and linking to one another to bring your content up front. Bandwidth is no longer a luxury so, when you consider building a web presence, look above the fence and see what others are doing don’t be afraid to use graphics as dial-up lines tend to be less used anywhere. Now you can play games online or just use a web template to build a website with little headache and great impact.

Which websites widened your world?

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. WordTracker
2. URL Trends
3. Hairy Mail

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

What is Social Media Optimization

Being a website owner or just writing a blog, like I do here, seems to be getting scarier. SEO - “Search engine optimization”, SMO -“Social media optimization”, “Content is King”, the right content to the right audience … wow, it could be frightening and it sounds like a ton of gold. I am a programmer so I’m not so much into marketing as I am into coding and yet I’m a fan of this world of fluid interaction. Knowing it exists and the effects it has on your blog or site is a must.

Some time ago I wrote an article on Web 2.0 that I’ve submitted to digg. The traffic spiked up as I got another 500 visitors in a day. That has to get you thinking, especially if you are into making some money. Was that “social media optimization”? I think it was just a taste of it. It’s a hot buzzword that adds up to SEO and sounds like a lot of time required to be invested.
SEO is about clearing the way for search engines to fully index your site, as well as using keywords in your text as often as you can do so without making it unreadable to the “internet scanner”, which is the way most visitors read articles (I’m among them). Social media optimization is about allowing your visitors to take away your content. Say what?! Well, yes, your content has to be easily shareable and commented on, even if this means implementing only the “Digg This” button on your blog, like the one at the bottom of this post. Tough to explain to your CEO, this should be an objective as visitors usually link back to worthy content, as long as the content is accessible. Adding tags and a Digg button, "Add to del.icio.us" or Technorati chicklet are the least you can do and it’s virtually painless. You can use a neat service like the one provided by AddThis.

Don’t get too excited though, most of the articles submitted to digg will only get one digg, yours. It’s not a recipe for success; it’s a way to get noticed.

Getting on the front page of social media sites offers credibility and visibility and those sound good to a site owner. A nice article about their experience with one of their articles and social media is shared by Daniel Tynski in the Anatomy of a Super Digg where, within five days, they received a total of almost 234,000 unique visitors.

Tips and tricks on how to get there are everywhere as bloggers are trying to monetize on the subject (what a free marketing campaign for those sites, huh?) and here are a few I find really useful an easy to read:

• 10 techniques for reaching the digg front page – Nice collection of articles


• Digg power user – Strategies to survive out there


• Become a del.icio.us power user – by David Brunelle

A comprehensive article on Social Media Optimization outlining the “5 rules of social media optimization” by Rohit Bhargava gets the tough part out of the buzzword.

The effects
Usually short lived and the traffic is barely converted. Links may be coming in, though, from quality sites, and people will at least get your newsletter or subscribe to your feed. You need to get the initial wave of visitors and convert them. Very few blogs are enjoying a constant attention and most of them never get any hits at all.

Free training
One of the real benefits to blogging and applying SEO and SMO is the training it provides to creating readable and inspired keyword rich content, increase expertise and encourages a discussion. Using social media certainly gets you a free training on using tags, providing a clean and comprehensive image of yourself and gets the word out.

Get back on the horse
Social media is about real life and living people. Digg has a feature called “bury” so life can be bitter in those communities as well as it can be sweet. Success is totally dependent on participation, on engagement. Compared to Search Engine Optimization, Social Media is definitely demanding more time.

It’s the ham and eggs paradigm, where the pig is committed and the chicken is only involved, it’s up to you to determine where you stand.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. PriceSpider
2. greenphone
3. 23andme

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your proposals for next week as comments.

And don't forget me at http://www.bynapse.com/.

Survive the confusion

There are 122,000,635 sites out there according to NetCraft and the key activities are now picture sharing, videos, blogging, forums, reviews, social networking and .. communities. It's a lot of place to lose yourself in and, as much as it looks crowded, it's only the beginning of the internet. So whom do you trust and whom do you turn to for advice when you're trying to make your way in cyberspace? How do you build your site and how do you promote it?

Ask yourself the following question : Do you trust brands or bloggers views over traditional marketing?

Can either of them be fully trusted ? The ultimate value of a web site has to be trust and probably that's what this new age of the internet is all about. Ten years of exquisite marketing campaigns can be thrown down the drain in six months by bloggers and forums telling a different story. Bloggers can be more honest and less censored than the "marketing message" that is often too polished. On the other hand, reviews are usually subjective and often don't offer the full understanding of the big picture. A Yahoo study found that 2 out of 3 regular social media users are advocates. Ford encouraged it's engineers to blog about how to make their engines better and got a lot of free and very reliable exposure while it developed a better engine. It's a total win for everybody and brands are moving marketing into the hands of professionals that speak about what they know. "Word of mouth" is powerful.

Social media brings exposure and gives you the actual pulse of the world. It also gives the marketers that same information and allows better targeting of the audience. Brands will always try to bring you in and make you switch, it's just a matter of choice and the multitude of sources of information is just the opportunity to provide a more comprehensive view.

Building or Tuning a website up these days may be a little frightening as the rules appear to be changing as we speak. The information moves from site to site getting commented on and being presented in ways only XML and aggregators made possible. Presentation of content is no more an essential part as you may read this post from any rss reader, my newsletter or a post on a social media site.

People don't go to portals any more, they demand a "come-to-me" environment and that is what aggregators, social networking pages, blogs and "web 2.0" applications stand for. To generate more confusion, more and more content is being user generated. The RSS feed icon illustrates probably the essence of what the web is about these days and new or updated sites should provide the feature as the important part is to be in the aggregated feed, on the screen, as the user picks the best-that-I-know-of content.

Bottom line, the time for canned content has gone. Portals are dead or mutating and news are delivered though aggregators rather than broadcasting companies websites, even if they usually originate there. Overhaul your site or start a new one thinking platform, collaboration, content sharing and reviewing. Let users create, move, tag and discuss as empowering them makes all the difference and provide core web services to open up to developers. Yes, your content will be scattered across the cyberspace and yet look how Flikr's name is present everywhere and pays nothing for it.

Web 2.0 websites for rookies

This age of the internet is all about decentralization.
Only a few years ago, during the “bursting of the dot-com bubble”, almost an entire generation concluded that the internet is over hyped and turned its attention elsewhere, thus leaving place to a new generation of technology and models to get center stage and turn the tables out in cyberspace. Web 2.0 does not mean there’s a new version of the internet out there, it’s not a technical specification. The term was promoted, according to Wikipedia, by O’Reily Media in 2003 and it’s explained in depth in the “What is Web 2.0” article.
The decentralization is the main concept that made the tables turn on the web and building a presence out in cyberspace these days has to consider the beneficial aspects of what took place. For marketers and brands, it’s still a headache, since the “portal” which was the key of the “first age” or “first generation” of internet communities is no longer the key to getting the word out. This time, the “consumer” is mastering its own universe and products and brands are orbiting around them. Bloggers and online communities go around constraints. It is human nature to avoid barriers and wherever one is encountered online, the stream goes around and ignores the constraint to a degree that may throw the site, brand or portal to internet’s shed and thus dramatically hurting its business. Blogging, social networking, search engines and friendly directories on the other hand are the new community and here is where “word-of-mouth” is happening and getting a recommendation about a product values more than all the publicity around it.
Excellent examples of Web2.0 websites are YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us or Technorati to name a few and, of course, Google which probably represents to Web 2.0 what Netscape meant to the internet before the turn of the century. There is a wealth of information out there so when you start your web presence, know that you should consider it.
Not everything that has the 2.0 extension at the end is really about web 2.0 though. It’s a concept and an age of the internet and many are trying to take a profit out of internet rookies by selling web 2.0 related items. Just use your better judgment and look for reviews in those wonderful online communities. Joining these new and dynamic communities is exciting and fulfilling as it opens up, literally, the planet and connects you to whatever is actually making news out there.
There has never been a better and easier time to join and get connected and for a website publisher or webmaster.

I’ve put together this list of ideas to get you started. Please comment and add to this list so that the web can benefit from it.

• Write a paragraph about what your website stands for and submit it to share sites like Digg, Reddit or Now Public. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and submit your site to StumbleUpon. Submit your following articles from your press section to those directories when you publish them on your site. If you’re writing for geeks, submit your site to Slashdot too. Here is a top 10 social bookmark links list from About.com.
• Create a Google Group or Yahoo Group covering your site topics.
• Create a blog and use it to be honest about your site or your interests. A blog is personal and the language used is less formal. You can actually write in a blog, responsibly but “off your company’s record”. Try using Blogger, Word Press or MySpace. I am also using Freewebs but I find Blogger to be the easiest to use. Now if you do that, you should join Technorati and claim your blog.
• Submit your site to search engine friendly directories and DMOZ.org. This process should be free but it’s time consuming.
• Most blogging directories offer Real Simple Syndication (RSS feeds) by default. You should use it for your site’s news section too. As soon as you have an RSS, submit it to feed aggregators like FeedBurner or Squidoo. Some of those aggregators offer you the possibility to send out a newsletter with the newest articles, automatically.
• Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers. We are living wonderful times for testing site appearance on different browsers and making sure that the site is compliant to W3C standards and looks good across browsers since Safari, the web browser used on Mac, is now available for windows too so you can have all the browsers on one OS to test with, unless you develop on Mac and you have IE5.
• Use excellent portals like YouTube and Google Video to post video and Flickr, Photobucket or Picasa Web Albums to publish photos.
• Search engines love XML sitemaps. You can submit that to Google webmaster tools and keep an eye on your site’s traffic with Google Analytics or the new set of tools from Yahoo, the Site Explorer.
  

Publishing advertisement and having high page ranking are good for the morale, but most visitors use ad-blockers and optimizing for search engines is a continuous job and there are professionals out there doing just that, keyword: “SEO Optimization”. Those are not the goals of the new websites and, if high page ranking helps, it does not guarantee popularity. For designers, digital-web offers a nice article about web 2.0 from the designer perspective.

I will not go into depths about what each of the sites mentioned above stands for. Research is probably the most enlightening experience one can have and I leave it all to you. Comment and add items to my lists and keep in mind that web 2.0 is all about social media, the consumer takes center stage, and that changes the world.

Conquering website basics

The web site is your magazine. You are publishing a highly interactive collection of columns on any subject you can think of, providing that the web site sticks to a certain content category.
The webmaster is the publisher, the designer is the editor and paired with a SEO expert and a graphic artist, the few html pages that are bound to become “the web site” are off to the cyberspace.
Now that you got a publishing house and decided what content you site shall provide, a handful of design concerns are due to emerge in the process, and due to the ever evolving nature of the internet and the technologies involved, a great many will emerge after the publishing process has been completed. A webmaster is there for that reason, keep in touch with the present and prevent the website from being stacked up in internet’s shed and lose all its traffic.
Ah, yes, traffic. This is the gold of the cyber world. Domain names, pictures, content, mailing lists are assets and good content is the key of bringing people over. Just sign in for my newsletter and you shall find out why.

For typical commercial Web sites, the basic design concerns are:
• Design: determined by the content and its category
• Content: the most important piece of the puzzle, the substance of the website and the key to “Search Engine Optimization”. Content relevance to the goals and the targeted public is paramount to the success of the site.
• Usability: Just see how Google gets to be on top... with such a simple interface. For the visitor, the easiness to reach the goal (which is not necessarily contained in the “marketing pitch” the site was designed around) is essential to further referring the site, linking to it or just submitting articles to social directories like digg.com which in turn, generate the so much needed extra traffic (that you are trying to retain and convert to the goals of the site). Just check out the billions of dollars worth of free publicity Apple gets only from the upcoming iPhone or from AppleTV.
• Consistency: the site looks and feels in a consistent and professional way. The appearance should include a single style (try using stylesheets to create a standard look for various objects on the site) that flows throughout. There are a few keywords about the style : clean, decent, simple, emphasize content even if the content IS pictures or videos.
• Readability: after all, the TEXT of the site is what got visitors in, even for the site that sells desktop wallpaper.
• SEO: The graphic designer and the SEO expert don’t usually get along very well. Optimizing the site for search engines is crucial to visitors coming to check out the content. Graphics should complement the text and make it easier to read while providing a relaxing environment for browsing the site. The site needs good old text and plain links to get noticed by search engines.

A nice and easy way to get started and conquer the basic design question: “How should the site look like?” can be overcome by using a website template like the ones at http://store.templatemonster.com/?aff=badulescu. Web templates are great ice breakers in the process of getting a website on its way.
Make sure the template, if you buy one, does not make a hole in your pocket at this stage though, the site needs to bring at least enough money to survive on its own.