Webinar: Jet Fuel for Your Community: Finding, Thanking, and Engaging Influencers (12/10/2008)

[#1]

Live Webcast Question: 

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We know there are influencers on other web sites, how do we get them to join and spend time in our organization's customer community?

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[#2]

Here are a few things that seem to be working in our community...

1) Create an optimized community structure, one that more logically groups and promotes discussion between people with common interest and need.  This might be grouped around content, product lines, language ect.

2) Foster higher value content and experiences in your community.   If the community is about a particular brand, service, or product set, over time many members may wish to interact directly with the company, so having company employees in the community, actively participating may create a compelling reason to participate on the company site in addition to other communities.  

3) Join other communities and become known.   Contributing in other communities, sharing links to potential solutions contained on our site can create traffic and expose new members to the site.  Conversely, sometimes linking out from our community and citing or recognizing an influencer in another commutinity can be a good approach as well.  

What "best practices" do others have to share for attracting and recruiting top influencers from the broader community?

Mark

[#3]

These are great suggestions from Mark.   I might step back and ask you why do you care.  Now, I kinda know the answer to that, but what I want to get after is what the goal and metrics are that have been set.  We are so ingrained to look at traffic/PVs that too often we see 3rd party communities in a "competitive" light and start thinking about share of conversation.  This is hazardous and can drive some bad behavior.  I'm not saying it is wrong to try to pull in the convo, but let's make sure our metrics are right on this vs driving a behavior. 

Another answer is you won't!!  If I'm an "MVP" and I build a very popular webboard or blog on your product and now I make ad revenue on the site - I ain't coming no matter what.  Find other ways to engage that influencer (product feedback for example).

Another example which maybe is implied in the overall topic, is you have to have an influencer program that found that person, thanked them and provides easy methods to pull them back to a conversation elsewhere.

You might also find they the core purpose of your site is uniquely different than the 3rd party - great!  Draw them with that. 

hopefully some ideas here that help.

sean