Image from WikipediaI had a friend in Monterey California whose passion was growing grass.Ever watched grass grow? It's not the most exciting thing to do. Watching time lapse photography of growing grass is much more fun.
My friend used to sit and watch grass grow. She loved it. She would sit and watch for hours.
She could make grass grow anywhere. And it always came up lush and green, thick enough to just lay around in.
She wouldn't just pile on fertilizer and chemicals. She worked with the native soil. That meant sandy mushy soil around Monterey. Not many people around Monterey have lawns. The soil just doesn't work.
She worked with the soil as it is. Her reasoning was simple: "The native soil is going to come back anyway. Why fight it?"
They hired her to work on the Pebble Beach golf course. She was a consultant.
If you watch a golf tournament at Pebble Beach, the first thing you'll notice is the long, gorgeous green fairways. Those aren't just fertilizer and sod. That grass grows because my friend knows how to make the grass grow.
Growing Communities
Growing an online community is a lot like watching grass grow. If you know what you're doing, it's just a matter of wanting to see how well it grows.
My first attempt at growing an online community was largely a failure. There were a lot of reasons. The guy I was working with had never heard of blogs. Almost no one in Australia had a blog in those days. No one had heard of Digg or Technorati. At least neither my client nor his customers.
It was a few years ago. Google hadn't even opened up an office in Australia. The Copyright Law amendments hadn't nearly closed down local entrepreneurial search engines. That stuff almost caused Google to refuse to index Australian sites altogether.
And, probably more than anything else, the Howard government was still working to frighten Australia away from the Web; and using Telstra's lust for profits to keep access slow and expensive.
Just an aside, I was talking to a guy who lives in Berwick a couple of days ago. He tells me he can't get ADSL. There are no ports on the phone exchange.Now, only a few years later, Australians are probably overrepresented on Facebook. There are even a couple of Australian social networking sites!
Berwick is a fast growing suburb of Melbourne with a university, a large TAFE, a hospital and a major regional clinic. Yet the residents can't even get reliable access to fraudband, much less ADSL.
It was just to keep the customers of my client coming back to his site. We set up a local business directory, and offered members the option of putting a web page on his site as advertising.
Not much of an effort, I know now. But, it did build the traffic to his site.
Members could comment on any of the articles on the site. In over a year, we got one comment. Maybe two, not counting the spamming on the blog.
Communispace, a company in Boston, sets up online communities. I found their press release from 2006 "10 Best Practices for Online Customer Communities" cited in a book by Larry Weber on Marketing the Social Web. Reading through the list as a sort of post mortem on my own efforts, it's not hard to see what worked and what didn't.
1. Invite the right people, keep it private and small. That wasn't hard. The company only had about 40 customers. Because my client wasn't familiar with the concepts though, he never invited them.
2. View members as advisors to the company. Membership was resisted because my client didn't want to be a source of spam. It was impossible to get past the idea of spam to the idea of community.
3. Find the social glue, make it member-centric. This was my mistake. I chose a social glue that could be perceived as negative. My intention was to empower the customers by informing them.
And then the social glue was never properly implemented. The blog was informative, but the website never adopted a goal of being informative or useful - in the customers' eyes.
4. Work at building the community. Building the community was done backwards. We would include a customer's website in the Local Business Directory, then try to get them to become involved.
The SEO boom hadn't begun. Internet access was much worse than today. Small business owners couldn't see the advantage of giving them a link to their sites. For that matter, many didn't know why the had websites - other than public expectations.
Almost all of my client's customers were home or small business. In my enthusiasm for the Web, I had closed my eyes to a reality of the target market.
5. Be genuine, encourage candor. We didn't have much response for other reasons. Too often the articles on the website and the blog were simply commercials for the company.
And there was the sense that some of the information in both places was giving away trade secrets.
Candor was not a goal. (insert wry chuckle here)
6. Just plain ask. When I could, I did. In an environment where the customer just wanted to know when it was done, asking for opinions and viewpoints was considered offensive. Customers didn't like being asked for their opinions about something they "knew nothing about but their kids (or grandkids) did".
This may seem like a strange reaction considering the statistical make up of Australians on the Web.
7. Pay even more attention to what members initiate. Instead of getting the customers' reactions on the site or blog, we did pay attention to the changing nature of customer requirements. On the ground, so to speak.
At that point in Australia's web history, maybe on the ground was the only means of discovering what the customers wanted (or initiated.)
8. Don’t squelch the negative. Despite some effort, this customer relationship was still one-way. In one-way customer interactions, negatives are always squelched one way or the other.
My client, and his customers, had expectations based on the principles of interruptive, not interactive, marketing.
9. Don’t ask too much, too often. Refer to comments on No.s 1-8 above.
10. Use the right mix of technologies and methodologies, and keep experimenting. Bingo.
The whole effort was the wrong mix of technologies and methodologies. My responsibility, of course. The community was largely a failure.
We certainly kept experimenting though.
The experiments bore fruit. The goals of the project were to:
- Maintain the customer base;
- Generate leads for new business;
- Promote referrals;
- and to Explore new sources of income.
Only a few new customers were added because of the site. But those customers opened up new avenues for business. The site gained prominence in the SERPs and page rank.
As an attempt to produce a community, the effort was largely a failure. But the project did double the business gross income and profits within a year.
I can't help but wonder if I made a good lawn?
We worked at it for over a year with poor results. There were so many things missing, not the least was an understanding of how to build an online community. Or even Why to build an online community given the online environment created by government, physical connections, and the naivete of most of the customers.
The results were better than the quality of the effort deserved perhaps. Then again, it was an innovative project for a small local company to initiate.
I had gone into the project with ambitious goals based on my experience in the US. This was Australia. It became a struggle with infinitesimals. The delta between 1 and 2 may be 100%, but the result is still insignificant for most purposes.
When I got the idea to work through this exercise, I had hoped it would offer some insights into building a community online. Looking over it, I can't say that it did. The concept of an online community could be better described as a point of conflict than a business goal. The story looks like a project management "failure to get high level advocacy" lesson.
I mean, with only 3 people involved, how much closer to the "reins of power" do you have to get? The answer is something like: "You just don't understand my customers." unfortunately. And in the end, that may be right.
SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey.
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