Online Communities was the topic for discussion at this year EN Race Day at Sandown Park this week and there was a common word raised throughout… content…
I’ll get to that in a minute, but what better way to start a round up than by using Ricardo Molina’s (panelist) summary at the end of the session:
“Be controversial.”
Why? By being controversial, you will create engagement. If you sit on the fence, you’ll never grow your conversations or your community. Pretty strong words to end on, but I think good ones for us to remember. If you bumble along producing the same old type, will anyone notice you?
The EN RaceDay was another great recent industry panel session delivered by Jamie (editor EN), bringing in experts (and newbies from the 30under30) from across our industry – whose voices we don’t normally get to hear.
The debate evolved around communities and how people engage with your brand. It would be impossible to transcribe the discussion of course, but I thought I’d highlight a few comments raised to help spark further thought.
- Don’t give control of your social media to your youngest team member in hope that because they “know them all” that they’ll know how to engage with your audience.
- Visitors don’t think about your event year round. If you want to engage with them on a “community” basis, provide them with some content to help them do their job better.
- Think about your brand. Do people want to talk to you, or do they want to listen?
- Stop talking about yourself! Communities are about listening & discussing, not just selling & telling
- Make sure you have plenty of content across your site / social sites to help you get found.
- Advisory board – the people that walk through your show doors are your advisory board. Not necessarily the guys that have been around for years and are purely looking for status, so engage with more cross section of your event – and they’ll engage more with the rest of your community.
- Influencers – they are great – but how do you measure it? There’s lot of tools to check on engagement on social sites etc., but are you measuring it? Are you putting too much resource behind someone that’s not really helping drive traffic to your event just because they’re a big name?
- Inviting colleagues can have massive effect on attendance & engagement (increase of 20% on some shows) because you don’t want to let your mate down if you know they’re going too. They’re part of your community
- Measure registration conversions better across your “communities” Are people more likely to register after seeing a debate on linkedin or on your web pages – are people more likely to register after reading a content page, rather than just landing on your home page? How have they engaged with you and how much are they engaged – rather than – quick visit and register.
- Day 1 highlights videos – “they’re pointless” no one cares what happened today if they haven’t yet attended – they want to know what’s coming up tomorrow, so give them some insight to the day ahead
- Struggling to engage on Linkedin? If you’re trying to create a community, don’t launch it around your brand, launch it around an interest. Your brand will naturally follow suit.
- If you’re worried about creating lots of content, when you run your event… you should have enough content to last you for the next year!
I can’t help but think that a lot of this comes back to three words that were used heavily and constantly come and go in various meetings…Content Is king.
If you create it, they will come…
Oh and FYI, a “strategy” for betting on horses shouldn’t really be – go for one the one with the highest odds. Appears they don’t seem to win that often…