Josh Klein Web Strategy

I’ve written about driving traffic with forums before, but what about running your own forums to keep traffic and build your business?

This week, I’m pleased to bring you an interview with social media thought leader Patrick O’Keefe. As the recent author of Managing Online Forums, and founder of the iFroggy Network, Patrick has a decade of experience developing and managing community websites.

Preface: Online Communities as a Web Strategy

If your visitors can discover consistent and new information daily, they’re more likely to return. If visitors form relationships with each other conducted through your website, they’re more likely to return. If they can use your site as their own platform for success, they’re more likely to return.

Online communities of all stripes can achieve these goals, from mailing lists to social networks. But forums are at the center.

The golden egg of web success is getting your visitors engaged to the point that they become invested in your success.

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Note: This article originally appeared on the blog of Drew McLellan, who was kind enough to invite me as a guest blogger. The article is reproduced here in full.

In the movie, Anchorman, there’s a moment when the character played by funnyman Steve Carell becomes so overwhelmed by the volume of the conversation - and the lack of attention being paid to him - that in a desperate plea to have his voice heard above the din, he shouts, “LOUD NOISES!”

Steve knows about bad advertising. We all do.

And yet so much advertising is just companies shouting loud noises. We’re all susceptible, as business marketers or just people who want to be heard, to be a part of this system.

When everyone else is talking loudly in the cafeteria, you’re tempted to raise your voice so people can hear you. You get a little louder, then someone else does, and soon the whole room is louder. So you get a little louder, so someone else does, and so on.

It’s not that you wanted to be loud, but you couldn’t help it. It’s a “collective action problem”, a tragedy of the commons.  We’d all prefer everyone being quiet to everyone being loud (less noise in our lives and less spend on ad dollars), but as long as everyone else is quiet, we cheat a little and raise our volume. And so does everyone else.

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I tried to put that line into a presentation on “digital innovation” for a late-blooming client (a behemoth of traditional marketing). The account team vetoed it - too many suits in the room, I think.

But I consider “nobody cares about you” to be the most important point of the whole presentation. It’s what marks the difference between the way things used to be and the way things are now.

See, traditional media is built from the bottom up to support business objectives. TV exists to sell ads. For a long time, the only way for Americans to spend their intellectual surplus (as Clay Shirky would say) was to watch sitcoms:

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I want to teach you a magic trick: how to mint your own money. Don’t worry – below, I’ll explain what this has to do with marketing and the web.

Let’s say I have a tasty sandwich I value at $4.00. You have $6.00 cash in hand. The world, as far as we are concerned, has $10.00 of value.

I’d like to make some money for buying beer this weekend, so I’m willing to sell you my sandwich for $5.00. I’ll be a whole $1.00 richer.

You value the eating of tasty sandwiches at $6.00, so you’re ecstatic to buy my tasty sandwich for $5.00. You’re going to have something you value at $6.00, plus $1.00 left over.

So we make the exchange: I now have $5.00, and you have $1.00 plus a sandwich you value at $6.00. The world has $12.00.

Holy shit, we just committed a felony by minting $2.00.

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Virtual reality (VR) is a good idea for escapist fantasies. I remember visiting Universal Studios, standing in line for 2 hours just get on the Back to the Future ride. I didn’t just feel real - I was in the DeLorean, flying through the skies chasing Biff.

Great, but so what?

Maybe VR could be useful for a military pilot, safely at base, piloting a drone into combat maneuvers. Maybe VR could be useful for a physician in New York doing surgery on a patient in Cape Town. But for regular ‘ol me, what use could I have for VR besides entertainment?

I think I first starting thinking of augmented reality (AR) after reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or maybe Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash. I know I associate AR with cyberpunk – how high tech alters human society in the near future – the particular form of science fiction that interests me.

AR is much more attractive than VR, because it is location agnostic. Human interaction with the environment is a precious thing, and I don’t want to suspend myself in a chamber and transport my senses to a distant place.

But I wouldn’t mind enhancing my daily interactions with the world around me. What would life be like if there wasn’t a wall between our regular lives and the lives we spent sitting at a screen?

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Liz Strauss thinks about how to connect people and businesses. Today, that means blogging. Liz runs SOBCon, a business school for bloggers, and writes a blog about successful blogging. If you want to know how your business could use blogging, she is the person to ask. To start you off, I asked Liz 4 questions.

4 Questions with Liz Strauss

Josh Klein: What’s the first thing that attracted you to blogging?

Liz Strauss: The first answer is that a publishing friend called me one day to say that her company, one I knew well, was thinking about starting a a blog, and would I be interested in writing it? I figured I’d better do some blogging to know what it took, because I had no idea what to charge . . .

The second answer is that I’ve always been fascinated with words, and a career in publishing made me think that I might be able to do it well enough. Ironically, I made the same mistakes everyone seems to make. I thought it was about writing. I thought it was about having something to say.

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Visitors coming to your site from forums are worth 2 to 6 times the average visitor. Why? Forum visitors are proactive information seekers, community-minded participants, and engaged users. They do more everything.

The evidence: traffic to my own blog.

In this article, I’m going to show you why you should use forums to drive traffic, then give you the 10 rules for getting it done.

As an example, I’ll discuss a forum I participate in hosted by Sitepoint.com, a resource for web designers and developers.

I use this forum for 3 reasons:

1. I have experience in this category, so I can have thoughtful discussions with my peers.

2. My expertise as a marketer complements the usual community member’s skill set, allowing me to contribute a unique viewpoint.

3. My site’s target audience overlaps with the forum’s audience.

Although the Sitepoint forum does not send me thousands of visitors every month, the traffic driven to my blog by the forum is of the highest quality.

The people referred to my blog from the forum read more, participate more, and come back for more.

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Economics isn’t the sexiest subject. You probably remember the law of supply and demand from high school, but don’t know as much about opportunity costs, shadow prices, price elasticity of demand, information asymmetry, and so on.

This article will not attempt to teach you Economics. You won’t learn what any of those terms mean. Instead, this article will influence you to learn more about the subject on your own as an essential part of Marketing (and life).

Economics leads us to some counter-intuitive explanations for people’s behavior. For example, it can show us that every natural death is a suicide, and that people have higher incomes in New York because time costs more there.

The Economic Approach to Marketing will re-frame your understanding of customer behavior. It will enable you to market your product, service, or idea in a way that directly addresses the unfulfilled needs of your customer. It is a way of thinking about the observations we make as marketers.

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Every website has the same purpose: buy.

It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a product (”buy my DVD-set”), a service (”hire me to turn your program around”), or an idea (”go green today”). It doesn’t matter if you’re a freelancer, a small business owner, a global superpower, or just on the web for fun.

If your visitor doesn’t take action (buy), you lost them. Building your website without appreciating a visitor’s perspective will lead to a poor site experience, and you’ll be scratching your head, wondering why visitors are leaving (while money leaks out of your pocket).

If, like most website owners, your team has followed conventions without considering why, you could do better. Here’s how:

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Extolling the virtues of social media as a marketing channel for your business is the dishonest fantasy of social media mavens. Social media is essential to online business success, just not in the way you thought.

That is the Social Media Myth, and I’m here to debunk it.

In this article, I’ll define what social media really means, describe your challenge in social media as a business, develop a framework for you to create your own social media strategy, then show you some examples of what social media success looks like.

I make the assumption that you are familiar with what some social media platforms are, just not how to use them. If you haven’t heard of a social network or blog, you should conduct some brief research before continuing.

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