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| #title Building Buzz - The Building Blocks of Buzz | #title Building Buzz - The Buzz Cycle |
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| == Setting Up Your Base == | == The Buzz Cycle == |
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| Many see buzz as a one-way street, analogous to television. They see it as a broadcasted message that people consume. They also see our primary goal as producing a message to be consumed. This is really only half of the goal. |
So far in this chapter we have explored many of the wider considerations for building buzz. Before we move on to look at some specific examples, we need to learn the final piece of buzz-theory: the buzz cycle. Whenever you build buzz, you execute on a set of procedures. When combined, this set of procedures ensures that you plan effectively, get as much anticipation for your announcement, and learn from the experience. These steps help frame the best practice involved in buzz making, and they will help you to better plan and structure how you get people excited about your community. |
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| When building buzz, we need to understand what we want. Our buzz is about our community and what our community achieves. When people experience our carefully crafted messages, what do we want them to do? What is their next step? What is our next step? |
The four stages are: |
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| A website is essential to achieve this. Whether your community is focused around technology, knitting, animal welfare, supporting the poor, or otherwise, a website is a critical resource that you should build and maintain. The ubiquity of the Internet and the low cost of equipment to view it have made an online presence the storefront for your community. If someone hears about your community, the first step he will take is to search for it. |
'''''Planning''''' |
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| Whether someone hits your website because he stumbled upon it or whether he read about it as part of your buzz, now is the time to grab his attention. You need to enthuse him and pump him up, and while he is engaged, get them up the ramp to be a contributor as easily as possible. Unfortunately, many communities don’t do this very well. |
Sitting down and building a recipe for what you want to achieve, how you can achieve it, and what is involved. |
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| Some still see the Web as a largely static medium. You put up a web page and once it is up, it never changes. These folks see websites merely as electronic information leaflets. My brother Martin used to be like this. |
'''''Buildup''''' |
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| Martin is heavily involved in conservation, and he runs an organization in Northern England called Rotters (http://www.rotters.org/ ). He and his family worked hard to secure land and set up facilities to perform community composting, train ex-prisoners and unemployed members of the local area, and to run events. One such event is his woodland festival: a cornucopia of rural attractions, including metalwork, chainsaw tree sculpture, performance art, and live music. |
Instead of going straight to the main course, why not start with an appetizer? Build up some excitement and mystery before the main event kicks in. |
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| Martin is an outdoorsy guy. He spends all day every day outside with his work. He is the kind of guy who just enjoys being knee-deep in mud and soaked to the skin on a cold English day. Yes, he is mad. Martin was never much of a computer guy. His organization’s website was a fairly boring-looking page with information that was once current but never got updated. |
'''''Announce''''' The core of our buzz, this is where we kick it out there. '''''Review''''' A postmortem of what we did, and an assessment of what worked, what didn’t, and how we can improve next time. Many newcomers to the buzz-building business jump straight to the announcement, with a marginal level of planning. I would strongly recommend against this. Buzz is an art form that can net incredible results for your community when executed correctly, but it can also cause lasting damage if you get it wrong. Planning and feedback will keep you with the former. To explain how each of these stages are important, I am going to use the 5-A-Day example that we talked about back in Chapter 4 that illustrates the buzz cycle well. 5-A-Day was a project that I conceived while watching a program about healthy eating. In many countries it is recommended that you should eat five portions of fruit or vegetables as part of a healthy diet. It makes healthy eating an easy-to-remember metric that people can factor into their routine, which is a compelling concept. Around that time, we were very conscious of how we handled our bug list. As Ubuntu grew as a project, the number of users grew; as such, so did the number of reported bugs. Inspired by five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, we formed the 5-A-Day initiative to encourage our community to triage or comment on five bugs a day. The project started and made some incredible progress. Now let’s look at the different buzz stages with this example as an illustration. == Planning == The reason buzz requires planning is that, to excite people, you need to know your goals, what tools and resources you need, and how to roll out your plan. You want to squeeze as much juice out of your efforts as possible and get as much focus and attention on your community as possible. You want maximum return for your investment in time. First, it is time to sit down and consider the different attributes and elements in your buzz initiative. Here are some questions that you should have answers for: * What outcome do you want to achieve? * What medium(s) are you going to use to achieve it? * What preparation work needs to occur before you can begin the buildup phase? * What other people are involved in the buzz and what are their tasks? * What is the timeline for the entire buzz cycle? The answers to these questions will give you a firm idea of your goals and how you can achieve them. For plans that involve only you, an awareness of the answers to these questions is enough. If you are going to be working with other people, however, you should document the answers. This will ensure everyone is on the same page. In the case of 5-A-Day, I was working with my team, Daniel Holbach and Jorge Castro. The preparation work involved the development of some technical facilities and tools, some documentation, and a timeline. We had a number of conference calls to build the plan, ensure the requirements were in place, and to specify deadlines for each of the buzz cycle phases. |
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| But computers became more intrinsic to his life and his organization. He started keeping accounts there, printing fliers and other publicity material, and using eBay to buy and sell equipment. Before long, he and his team rebuilt the website into a vibrant resource about the organization. It had pictures, stories, news, and more. Since the website has been refreshed, Rotters has received more publicity, members, and interest. |
'''''DEADLINES KEEP YOU ALIVE'''''' |
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| Your website is your community’s Embassy of Buzz. Make it rock. | Many people hate deadlines. They commit us to specifics. For many, and particularly those who enjoy the free-form nature of community, deadlines are unwelcome. Stick with them, though. Deadlines are critical to achieve goals. In this chapter our goal is effective buzz. When you have multiple people involved in a buzz-building exercise, you need to ensure everyone delivers their contribution to the project on time. |
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| == Aims == | When you apply deadlines, ensure they are documented somewhere. For my team, we plan the deadlines up front and put them on our shared calendar. This is a useful means of reminding you when deadlines are near. The key is ensuring deadlines are in a place where you will look. If they are buried away in a file or notebook, they are of no use to anyone. == Buildup == The next step is when things start to get exciting. This phase brings to mind the often-trumpeted statement “some things are better left to the imagination.” It’s true. In this phase we want to tease people with a taster of what is to come. We want to pique their curiosity, tempt their senses, and get people chattering about what we are up to. When done right, this phase can deliver some riveting and memorable buzz, before you even announce what you are doing. I also used this technique to announce that I was working on The Art of Community (http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/01 /13/announcement/ ). A few days before I announced the project and the website, I took a screenshot of the website and motion-blurred it. I deliberately blurred it so that you could not see what was on the site, but you could just make out the word “Community.” Underneath the screenshot I simply wrote “Wednesday 14th January 2009 @ jonobacon.org.” A flurry of over 35 comments then appeared, each musing on what the project could be. Many even tried to unblur the screenshot to see what was there. An hour before I posted the main announcement, a reader called Kyran managed to unblur and provided a link to the new website. On the 5-A-Day campaign, too, we had an interesting idea. Over the week building up to the announcement, Daniel; Daniel’s girlfriend, Mimi; Jorge; and I each posted photos to our blogs that had us showing symbols with the number 5 in them. My first blog post included the photo in Figure 6-1. (Although I was clearly trying to look cool in the photo, the world and his dog seemed to be mostly amused at the fact I was watching Along Came Polly on my TV in the background. Buzz can sometimes backfire.) Underneath the photo, I also pulled some text from Wikipedia about the number 5 and put it underneath the photograph: 5 (five) is a number, numeral, and glyph. It is the natural number following 4 and preceding 6. Five is between 4 and 6 and is the third prime number, after 2 and 3, and before 7. Because it can be written as 2^(2^1)+1, five is classified as a Fermat prime. 5 is the third Sophie Germain prime, the first safe prime, and the third Mersenne prime exponent. Five is the first Wilson prime and the third factorial prime, also an alternating factorial. It is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1. It is also the only number that is part of more than one pair of twin primes. Five is conjectured to be the only odd untouchable number. When viewed together, particularly on Planet Ubuntu, the blog posts were clearly connected. This started a flurry of discussion about what we could be up to. NOTE It should be noted that buildup should only be used on genuinely interesting initiatives. Don’t bother using buildup on things that will fail to excite people. As an example, buildup would be great for a new project or initiative, but awful for a change in policy in how your community is governed. == Announce == At this point in the cycle, there should be some rampant speculation regarding the hints you have been dropping in the buildup. You should be seeing suggestions from the sublime to the ridiculous. Don’t go too far with the buildup, though. Allow just a few weeks before you reveal your mystery with an announcement. When announcing you need to ensure you answer all of the most immediate questions the speculators have. If after all the buildup you don’t come through with a smörgåsbord of answers, it will simply cause frustration. You want those riddled with curiosity to be delighted to have their curiosity quenched when they hear the news. The first step when announcing is to point someone somewhere to read, hear, or watch your announcement. You should have a single location to direct people to. For most communities, this is a website. Your goal now is to make the page easy to read. Most announcements that communities tend to make are posted on their website, but there is an important consideration to bear in mind with web announcements: computer screens are hard to read. Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s highest regarded usability gurus, wrote about the impact of screen text on readers (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/whyscanning.html ): Reading from computer screens is tiring for the eyes and about 25 percent slower than reading from paper. No wonder people attempt to minimize the number of words they read. To the extent this reason explains users’ behavior, they should read more when we get high-resolution, high-scanrate monitors in five years since lab studies have shown such screens to have the same readability as paper. With reading on screens known to be more tiring, this behavior naturally translates to people wanting to read less and scan more. As such, we need to deliver our announcement quickly and effectively. It’s important that we get our announcement in perspective: it is going to be one of hundreds of things that the person will read on the Internet that day. We need to stand out. We need to grab the reader’s attention and deliver our content. Nielsen’s solution to this problem is simple: write half as much. In his excellent “Writing for the Web” article (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html ), Nielsen recommends three guidelines that can help: * Be succinct : write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication. * Write for scannability : don’t require users to read long, continuous blocks of text. * Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages. We are trying to avoid swathes of text. We need to architect our announcement so our readers can skip over parts and get straight to the meat. |
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| Building a great website may seem a daunting process. The foundation, though, is simple. Your website should seek to satisfy the following aim: |
Let’s look at an example. Imagine we are writing an announcement to solicit papers for a conference on renewable energy. Let’s start with a high suck factor and write an announcement we can tear apart afterward: |
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| * Provide a current resource that answers questions and maintains a relationship with the reader. | Call for Papers Open |
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| Write this down and stick it on your wall. Tattoo your children with it if you need to. Let’s break this down into key areas. Bear these aspects in mind when considering how to build your site: |
Cranfield Green Alliance is a renewable energy conference that takes place in Cranfield, Bedfordshire. The conference is located at Cranfield University and runs from 10–12 November 2009. The conference covers a range of topics including renewable energy, alternative lifestyles, green cooking, ecological trends, and more. We are now opening up our call for papers and encourage a variety of environmental professionals to submit presentations in their area of expertise. Papers on a range of subjects are welcome and we would encourage you all to submit something soon. The conference attracts a wide range of attendees and exhibitions, and we welcome your involvement in this important event. Your contributions as a visitor or a speaker will be valuable. To submit your paper you should email papers@cranfieldgreenalliance.co.uk no later than 1st October 2009. We look forward to your submissions! |
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| ''Great overview '' | Friends, what we have just experienced is unremarkable, flat, and about as exciting as a paintdrying competition. I am sorry I subjected you to that paragraph: I realize you will never get those minutes back. Consider it a sacrifice for your community. OK, let’s apply some of the guidance we have discussed so far. Let’s make the language exciting and inspirational, break up the paragraph so it is easier to read and scan, and make it succinct and clear. Tighten your seat belts. |
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| * If I visit your website, I want to be able to get an overview of the community, its goals, and how to get involved, all within the space of a few minutes. This information should be up-front, easy to access, and easy to read, and should have a simple web address that you can point people to (e.g., www.myproject.com/overview). | Here we go: |
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| ''Great documentation'' | Cranfield Green Alliance Call For Papers Open! |
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| * Your website should provide documentation and guidance for all aspects of your community. This will always be an ongoing process, but you should consider which aspects of your community are most important and need to be documented. As an example, the process that new members follow to join your community should be a priority. | 10–12 November 2009: Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, England. Leading the way to define a new future fueled by renewable energy. Including exciting and industry-relevant topics such as renewable energy, alternative lifestyles, green cooking, ecological trends, and more. Leaders of the field bring a great opportunity to learn from the finest minds in the industry. |
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| ''Great communication '' | PLAY YOUR PART IN THE REVOLUTION |
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| * You should ensure that it is really easy for people to get in touch with you with questions, suggestions, and feedback. I would recommend that as a minimum you have an email address that is easy to access. This is a notable problem with many blogs. Many blogging tools (such as WordPress at the time of this writing) do not provide an easy-to-access contact link, and this can make it impossible to get in touch with the author of the blog. |
Do you want to get your voice heard? Do you want to help inspire and encourage a new generation of renewable energy? We thought so. It’s time to submit a paper... Submit a paper on any relevant green topic and deliver it to an audience of over 500 attendees. HOW TO SUBMIT: Send papers to papers@cranfieldgreenalliance.co.uk no later than October 1, 2009!! |
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| Building a website is a little like painting a picture or writing a song: it is never finished. Creative types always want to add a last fleck of paint or final flourish on the guitar. With a seemingly endless stream of possibility with your website, you need to prioritize. To do this, write down a list of everything you want to achieve, and then order it by what you consider most critical. Naturally, elements such as the contributor ramp should be near the top of the list. |
Good luck! |
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| == Staying Current == | In this example we performed a number of steps to brighten our announcement. This included: |
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| The most important element in any website is content, and the most important golden rule with content is that it needs to be current and accurate. Of course, the two terms are somewhat intermingled: content about your community that is on your website from 1998 is probably not going to be all that accurate any more. Creating current content is a two-part process. First, your community processes and methodologies need to be up-to-date. There is nothing more frustrating than joining a community, following the published guidelines to get involved, and then being told that the guidelines are out of date and that you need to adjust your work. That is a surefire way of annoying new contributors. The second area, and the area that fits in neatly with buzz, is news and updates. Your site needs to be a window to exciting content about the community, and this window needs to be updated regularly. If you want people to keep coming back to your website, you need to give them a reason. That reason is fresh content. You should build a strategy for publishing news. This in itself may seem like a simple task. I know what you are thinking: “Jono, I will just regularly post something new to the website. Simple!” Not quite. Many communities struggle with regular updates. People simply get busy. People get distracted. Other priorities in the community take over. If all of your news gets posted by one person, and that person decides to spend evenings redecorating a house instead, you lose. When people get busy, they tend to drop nonessential and nonfun tasks. News updates are often one of these first casualties. So divide this work between a number of contributors. Find three or four people who are happy to update the news site, and talk to each other about what news you are going to post. == Building Conversation == Posting news is one way to keep a website current. There is, however, another approach to keep your site alive: conversation. The Internet has become an incredible place to have conversations. Countless forums, websites, and blogs have provided a medium in which anything and everything can be discussed. You should ensure your website is in on the action. Conversation and commenting facilities are an incredible way of making visitors feel that they have input in to the community. These facilities are typically fairly simple: a blog or news entry is posted, and readers can leave a comment underneath the content to share their thoughts. This has two benefits: Regular content Conversation is content that other people provide to your website. Your visitors will come back to participate in the conversation, and your website will always be fresh and full of new and interesting things to read. Engagement Allowing any visitor to the website to post an opinion or comment is an incredible statement about engagement. Providing this facility says to all of your visitors that your site is open and always welcoming comments. These two features in themselves are justification enough for having these facilities on your website, but there is one even more important reason: community. If you allow people to participate on your website, building a reputation tied to their name, community will thrive on your website. Community growth is our end game, and growth happens around conversations. I have experienced this in a number of places, with the most personal being my own website at http://www.jonobacon.org/. For a number of years I have had comment facilities on my site, and over the years I have developed a regular readership that comes back to contribute to the topics of the posts. If this is possible on an individual’s website, just imagine what is possible on a community’s website! ---- || ||<:99%> '''KEEPING THE CONVERSATION FLOWING''' || || Providing commenting facilities is only the beginning of growing community on your website. To do this you will need to be more proactive than normal in encouraging conversation. Here are some quick tips: * Be responsive. View every comment to your website as seeking a response. Respond and ask questions to keep the comments coming in. * Write news that generates discussion. In your news items, you should explicitly ask for feedback and responses. * Be thankful. Regularly thank your contributors for great comments and feedback. * Reward the regulars. You should think carefully about how to reward your regular contributors. One approach I have taken with my own blog is to give the top three contributors a gift, such as a DVD or book. This shows everyone that you really care about their participation. At the beginning of growing your community, you will need to be proactive, but as conversation within the community grows, you can take a step back. ---- == Getting Online == Fortunately, you don’t need to have super-technical skills to get a great website with conversation facilities up and running. There are a number of preexisting tools that will do the job perfectly. The easiest method of getting going is to use a blogging engine. A blogging engine is a software tool that lives on a website and provides a simple interface for you to publish an article. You can use an editor to format the article in different ways (make parts bold, italic, underlined, different headings, links, images, etc.), and you can also split the posts into different categories. These systems do not require any programming abilities. There are many free online services for setting up blogs, and with them you can get up and running quickly. They allow you to publish your blog entries and ensure they are indexed by popular search engines, such as Google. Unfortunately, many of these services don’t allow you to have your blog at your own web address. If you would prefer the blog to be on the same domain as your website, you can install your own blogging engine. There are many free and commercial blogging engines available, but I would personally recommend WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/ ). WordPress offers an excellent, easy-to-use, and powerful framework for publishing content easily. To install your own WordPress website, you will need to have your own server, which you can purchase from a hosting company. They will provide a place to install the software, and you can set it up. Many hosting companies also offer preinstalled WordPress, Drupal, and other systems. ---- || ||<:99%> ROLL YOUR OWN VERSUS PREEXISTING ENGINE || || ---- When the need for a new website arises, some people prefer to install an engine such as WordPress, and some prefer to write a site from scratch. I highly recommend that, where possible, you use a preexisting engine. Years ago I wrote my own website engine, and it just wasn’t as good as something such as WordPress. It’s fairly simple to see why: a project such as WordPress has hundreds of developers creating new features and fixing problems. This nets more functionality and a more stable experience in general. If you really feel the need to have your own custom website, ensure that you have the resources to maintain it for a long time. When you invest in that website today, you will need to be able to still invest in its maintenance in a year, in two years, or more. Think carefully about this decision: if you go with a preexisting engine such as WordPress, that maintenance is done for you. == Syndication == |
* Separating out the key parts of the message into separate headings and paragraphs. * Converting the language to be more rabble-rousing and inspiring. * Engaging in a rhetorical dialog with the reader by asking questions and clearly showing that the answer was to submit a paper, which is the very aim of the announcement. |
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| In the last five years there has been a change in how people access content on the Internet. Traditionally, the only way you could get updates from a website was to repeatedly visit the website to check for new content or features. This meant having a number of bookmarks in your web browser and cycling through them hunting for updates. Fortunately, a solution to this problem has been developed, known as syndicated feeds. Once the forte of the techie, they are now popular across the Internet. |
Your announcement page should pass the elevator test: it should get the reader up to speed with what you are announcing within a minute. Let’s get back to our 5-A-Day example. When we were constructing the 5-A-Day announcement, we produced a page that identified the primary concept of 5-A-Day, how people could get involved, and what they needed to do. Each of the different pieces of information had individual headings, and emphasis was used extensively. View the page at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day to see the principles in this section in action—and with a successful outcome. |
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| When you use a blogging website engine (such as WordPress), each time you add a new entry, a special feed will be updated with the content. This feed sits on the same website. Your readers can then use a piece of software called a feed reader to subscribe to the feed. |
== Review == |
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| As an example, on my website at http://www.jonobacon.org/, I have a feed available at http: //www.jonobacon.org/feed/. This is a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. |
Postmortems are hugely valuable in any kind of work, and if you don’t perform them, you never learn how to improve. Whether you are evaluating how well you handled a discussion, cooked a meal, taught your kids how to play football, or built community buzz, a review can uncover great opportunities for improvement: |
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| ''NOTE '' | '''Efficiency''' When you review your work, it gives you an opportunity to identify areas that are inefficient and redundant. You can use these as a basis for improvement. |
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| A good introduction to these feeds is on the BBC website at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm. | '''Feedback''' Gathering feedback from the people who consumed your buzz is a great way to see what they felt worked and what didn’t. This is a great opportunity to get feedback on your writing, structure, and the other concepts throughout this chapter. |
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| With most websites providing these feeds, you can subscribe to a number of your favorite websites in your feed reader. Each time you load the reader, it will check each of the feeds for updates and indicate if there is new content. This is not only a hugely efficient way of reading lots of websites, but the feeds typically don’t include all of the website imagery and design. This means you just get the content and don’t have to download all of the other fluff. |
'''Ideas''' When any kind of postmortem of an approach occurs, it almost always generates new ideas. These will help future buzz cycles to be more effective. In the review phase, revisit the questions you asked in the planning phase and compare the plan with what happened: |
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| You should ensure your website provides these feeds. Most engines (such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, and others) provide support for these feeds by default, making it really easy to include this functionality on your website. |
* Did you stick to your aim and communicate it well to others? * Did you identify the right outcomes to achieve? * Were your chosen mediums the most suitable? * Did you prepare effectively? * Did you communicate well to others involved in the buzz about what needed to be done? * Was your timeline for the buzz cycle accurate? Did you hit your deadlines? |
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| Syndication feeds also allow people to take your content and merge it into their own website. This has been happening more and more in recent years. Tools can easily embed feeds into the sidebar of a website, for example. There is also a new kind of website appearing called a planet. These websites take a number of syndication feeds about related subjects and show the posts in the correct order. This produces a rolling collection of interesting content: readers simply visit the planet and then read a large number of related websites that they were probably unaware of. A great example of this is Planet Ubuntu (http://planet.ubuntu.com). You should seek to get your feed syndicated to these other sites. It can drive some incredible traffic to your site and get your words out further afield. == Search Engine Optimization == A popular buzzword in the online world is search engine optimization (SEO). It is the science of how to ensure that your website appears at the top of search engines. It is a large and complex science, but I want to give you just a few quick tips that will get you started: * Using preexisting engines can make this easier. When you use a blogging engine, the creators of the engine have likely already thought about optimizing for SEO. This will automatically get you higher rankings. * Make sure titles and headings (which factor heavily in searches) are meaningful and contain the words people will look for. It’s OK to have a cutesy title like “Why I’m tired this morning,” but also include some meaningful indicator of the content, such as “...because I finished the Bike for MS research fundraiser.” * When posting images inside your news/blog posts, ensure that you specify some text to describe the image. This is done in the altattribute of the image tag. For example: <img alt="My Dog" src="dog.jpg"> * Comment and conversation facilities will increase your SEO by bringing regular traffic to your website and encouraging links. The key to SEO is having great content that attracts regular traffic. Focus your efforts on getting more people to your website, and your SEO rating will flourish. == Microblogging == In recent years the Twitter phenomenon has taken over the Internet, creating what many call microblogs. While other alternatives to Twitter exist, such as the open source identi.ca and Facebook’s status facility, Twitter continues to rule the roost. For those of you who have no idea what on earth I am talking about, let me explain using Twitter as the primary example. When you sign up to Twitter, you get a user account that you can point people to. As an example, mine is http://www.twitter.com/jonobacon. I can then type in a short message of no more than 140 letters, and it appears on that page. These messages are quick bursts of what is in that person’s mind at the time, and typically contains what they are doing at the moment, interesting thoughts or links on the Internet, random musings, and other content. As an example, here are my last five messages at the time of writing: Up where I was born in North Yorkshire seeing family, having a wonderful time. Heading out tonight for a bit of a gathering. Fun. :-) !ubuntu !ubuntulocoteams !ubuntudevelopers Folks, remember to send me over the photos from your release parties -http://tinyurl.com/d2uh3s At the office. Tired after a busy week and the release party last night. Rolling sleeves up to attack the inbox. This is going to get ugly. Ubuntu 9.04 is out! Thanks for everyone’s hard work on a fantastic release !ubuntu ! ubuntudevelopers !ubuntulocoteams :-) Btw folks, point your beady ones at http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/04/22/ayatana/ - new Design focused desktop love in the form of Ayatana. '''''NOTE''''' Some of these messages contain some words beginning with an exclamation point (e.g., !ubuntulocoteams). This is a feature in the identi.ca service (an open source equivalent to Twitter) that sends the message to a group that users can subscribe to. This gets your message out to more people. Using Twitter, you can then subscribe to someone’s messages, or they can subscribe to yours. This is called following. This provides a means to see a chronological list of thoughts from people you are interested in. Many of you will be wondering why on earth anyone would care about this. When I first heard about Twitter, I was no different. In fact, I was bullied into Twitter when a few friends of mine registered an account under my name and started posting joke messages. When they finally surrendered the account to me, I decided to give it a whirl and have been hooked ever since. Microblogging offers many benefits: '''Hugely viral''' Microblogging messages seem to get everywhere. People read your messages and decide to subscribe, others point to your messages, they appear on search engines, and many microbloggers have a widget that shows their latest messages on their website. '''Lots of content''' Microblogging requires far less time to engage in than wider structured articles, such as conventional blog entries. As such, you generally see far more content. '''Current''' Many people watch their microblogging feeds throughout the day. This currency has been demonstrated in many cases. As an example, a friend of mine went to San Jose and tweeted asking for a great seafood restaurant and had multiple recommendations within minutes. '''Great messaging medium''' When people start subscribing to your messages, it provides an excellent channel to send content to. The last item is the most interesting part of microblogging. If you make use of microblogging effectively, you have the opportunity to build an audience to regularly send content to. Many assume that Twitter is the only option here, but there are others you should sign up for, too. The three I primarily use are Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook. These three resources have become a compelling audience for my content. As an example, at the time of writing I have 2,000+ Twitter subscribers, 800+ identi.ca subscribers, and 1,400+ Facebook friends. This is significant group of people who can read my content whenever I send it out. To make this easier, you can use tools to cross-post content to each of these resources. I use a tool called Gwibber (https://edge.launchpad.net/gwibber) in which my message is posted to both Twitter and identi.ca, and I have installed a Facebook application that posts my Twitter messages as status updates in Facebook. Finally, I have included Twitter messages on my blog so that my audience there can read them. Whether you have a single Twitter account or the chained-together system that I just described, there are some hints and tips that you should bear in mind when using microblogging to build buzz: '''Be spontaneous''' Much of the reason why microblogging has taken off is that it is perfectly acceptable to post a quick one-liner with something that is in your head. Not everything needs to be carefully considered. '''Be yourself''' For most people I know who are fans of microblogging, they love how it offers an insight into the lives of the microblogger. As such, feel free to mix together multiple topics. It’s perfectly fine to wake up in the morning and send a message about your awesome cup of coffee, then to mention a cool project in your community, share a great link to something you read on someone’s blog, complain about the terrible service at lunch, and then point your community to a website where you want to gather their feedback. '''Don’t txt''' Many newcomers to microblogging hear that it is comparable to SMS text messaging and then write in txt speak (e.g., “Gr8 time at comedy show. Much lols. Thx Mary :-)”). Feel free to use full, normal words that the rest of us understand. '''Always link''' If you are talking about your community, link to something where the reader can find out more. Microblogging is a great springboard to your community resources, so feel free to share them. '''Share achievements''' When something cool in your community happens, microblog it. Encourage others to do the same. This not only spreads the word, but also acts as a rather nice public pat on the back to the folks who did the cool thing. '''Gather feedback''' Microblogging is a fantastic method of gathering feedback. This is something I used while writing The Art of Community. I used it to ask my subscribers for their thoughts and opinions on given subjects that I was writing about, and I got some fantastic responses. Due to the medium being limited to 140 characters per response, ensure that you ask for very specific feedback so people can fit it in. '''Share events''' If you have an event scheduled, such as an online meeting, microblog when the meeting is announced and also when it is an hour away. Many people will read the message and join. I discovered the power of this when I did my first videocast. I switched the camera on and microblogged it, and within minutes 24 people were watching. As you can see, there are many advantages to microblogging, and although it seems redundant at first, give it a whirl. I am willing to bet you find it useful in your community. |
To make this process effective, you should gather feedback from members of your community. Seek to gather responses from those who will provide you with constructive advice of what worked and what didn’t. Remember, much of the goal here is to identify flaws in your approach. Flaws are nothing to be embarrassed about: they are opportunities to do even better next time. |
From The Art Of Community by O'Reilly (http://www.artofcommunityonline.org) by Jono Bacon
The Buzz Cycle
So far in this chapter we have explored many of the wider considerations for building buzz. Before we move on to look at some specific examples, we need to learn the final piece of buzz-theory: the buzz cycle. Whenever you build buzz, you execute on a set of procedures. When combined, this set of procedures ensures that you plan effectively, get as much anticipation for your announcement, and learn from the experience. These steps help frame the best practice involved in buzz making, and they will help you to better plan and structure how you get people excited about your community.
The four stages are:
Planning
Sitting down and building a recipe for what you want to achieve, how you can achieve it, and what is involved.
Buildup
Instead of going straight to the main course, why not start with an appetizer? Build up some excitement and mystery before the main event kicks in.
Announce
The core of our buzz, this is where we kick it out there.
Review
A postmortem of what we did, and an assessment of what worked, what didn’t, and how we can improve next time. Many newcomers to the buzz-building business jump straight to the announcement, with a marginal level of planning. I would strongly recommend against this. Buzz is an art form that can net incredible results for your community when executed correctly, but it can also cause lasting damage if you get it wrong. Planning and feedback will keep you with the former. To explain how each of these stages are important, I am going to use the 5-A-Day example that we talked about back in Chapter 4 that illustrates the buzz cycle well.
5-A-Day was a project that I conceived while watching a program about healthy eating. In many countries it is recommended that you should eat five portions of fruit or vegetables as part of a healthy diet. It makes healthy eating an easy-to-remember metric that people can factor into their routine, which is a compelling concept. Around that time, we were very conscious of how we handled our bug list. As Ubuntu grew as a project, the number of users grew; as such, so did the number of reported bugs. Inspired by five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, we formed the 5-A-Day initiative to encourage our community to triage or comment on five bugs a day. The project started and made some incredible progress. Now let’s look at the different buzz stages with this example as an illustration.
Planning
The reason buzz requires planning is that, to excite people, you need to know your goals, what tools and resources you need, and how to roll out your plan. You want to squeeze as much juice out of your efforts as possible and get as much focus and attention on your community as possible. You want maximum return for your investment in time. First, it is time to sit down and consider the different attributes and elements in your buzz initiative. Here are some questions that you should have answers for:
- What outcome do you want to achieve?
- What medium(s) are you going to use to achieve it?
- What preparation work needs to occur before you can begin the buildup phase?
- What other people are involved in the buzz and what are their tasks?
- What is the timeline for the entire buzz cycle?
The answers to these questions will give you a firm idea of your goals and how you can achieve them. For plans that involve only you, an awareness of the answers to these questions is enough. If you are going to be working with other people, however, you should document the answers. This will ensure everyone is on the same page. In the case of 5-A-Day, I was working with my team, Daniel Holbach and Jorge Castro. The preparation work involved the development of some technical facilities and tools, some documentation, and a timeline. We had a number of conference calls to build the plan, ensure the requirements were in place, and to specify deadlines for each of the buzz cycle phases.
DEADLINES KEEP YOU ALIVE
Many people hate deadlines. They commit us to specifics. For many, and particularly those who enjoy the free-form nature of community, deadlines are unwelcome. Stick with them, though. Deadlines are critical to achieve goals. In this chapter our goal is effective buzz. When you have multiple people involved in a buzz-building exercise, you need to ensure everyone delivers their contribution to the project on time.
When you apply deadlines, ensure they are documented somewhere. For my team, we plan the deadlines up front and put them on our shared calendar. This is a useful means of reminding you when deadlines are near. The key is ensuring deadlines are in a place where you will look. If they are buried away in a file or notebook, they are of no use to anyone.
Buildup
The next step is when things start to get exciting. This phase brings to mind the often-trumpeted statement “some things are better left to the imagination.” It’s true. In this phase we want to tease people with a taster of what is to come. We want to pique their curiosity, tempt their senses, and get people chattering about what we are up to. When done right, this phase can deliver some riveting and memorable buzz, before you even announce what you are doing. I also used this technique to announce that I was working on The Art of Community (http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/01 /13/announcement/ ). A few days before I announced the project and the website, I took a screenshot of the website and motion-blurred it. I deliberately blurred it so that you could not see what was on the site, but you could just make out the word “Community.” Underneath the screenshot I simply wrote “Wednesday 14th January 2009 @ jonobacon.org.” A flurry of over 35 comments then appeared, each musing on what the project could be. Many even tried to unblur the screenshot to see what was there. An hour before I posted the main announcement, a reader called Kyran managed to unblur and provided a link to the new website.
On the 5-A-Day campaign, too, we had an interesting idea. Over the week building up to the announcement, Daniel; Daniel’s girlfriend, Mimi; Jorge; and I each posted photos to our blogs that had us showing symbols with the number 5 in them. My first blog post included the photo in Figure 6-1.
(Although I was clearly trying to look cool in the photo, the world and his dog seemed to be mostly amused at the fact I was watching Along Came Polly on my TV in the background. Buzz can sometimes backfire.)
Underneath the photo, I also pulled some text from Wikipedia about the number 5 and put it underneath the photograph: 5 (five) is a number, numeral, and glyph. It is the natural number following 4 and preceding 6. Five is between 4 and 6 and is the third prime number, after 2 and 3, and before 7. Because it can be written as 2(21)+1, five is classified as a Fermat prime. 5 is the third Sophie Germain prime, the first safe prime, and the third Mersenne prime exponent. Five is the first Wilson prime and the third factorial prime, also an alternating factorial. It is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1. It is also the only number that is part of more than one pair of twin primes. Five is conjectured to be the only odd untouchable number.
When viewed together, particularly on Planet Ubuntu, the blog posts were clearly connected. This started a flurry of discussion about what we could be up to.
NOTE
It should be noted that buildup should only be used on genuinely interesting initiatives. Don’t bother using buildup on things that will fail to excite people. As an example, buildup would be great for a new project or initiative, but awful for a change in policy in how your community is governed.
Announce
At this point in the cycle, there should be some rampant speculation regarding the hints you have been dropping in the buildup. You should be seeing suggestions from the sublime to the ridiculous. Don’t go too far with the buildup, though. Allow just a few weeks before you reveal your mystery with an announcement.
When announcing you need to ensure you answer all of the most immediate questions the speculators have. If after all the buildup you don’t come through with a smörgåsbord of answers, it will simply cause frustration. You want those riddled with curiosity to be delighted to have their curiosity quenched when they hear the news. The first step when announcing is to point someone somewhere to read, hear, or watch your announcement. You should have a single location to direct people to. For most communities, this is a website. Your goal now is to make the page easy to read.
Most announcements that communities tend to make are posted on their website, but there is an important consideration to bear in mind with web announcements: computer screens are hard to read. Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s highest regarded usability gurus, wrote about the impact of screen text on readers (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/whyscanning.html ): Reading from computer screens is tiring for the eyes and about 25 percent slower than reading from paper. No wonder people attempt to minimize the number of words they read. To the extent this reason explains users’ behavior, they should read more when we get high-resolution, high-scanrate monitors in five years since lab studies have shown such screens to have the same readability as paper.
With reading on screens known to be more tiring, this behavior naturally translates to people wanting to read less and scan more. As such, we need to deliver our announcement quickly and effectively. It’s important that we get our announcement in perspective: it is going to be one of hundreds of things that the person will read on the Internet that day. We need to stand out. We need to grab the reader’s attention and deliver our content.
Nielsen’s solution to this problem is simple: write half as much. In his excellent “Writing for the Web” article (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html ), Nielsen recommends three guidelines that can help:
- Be succinct : write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication.
- Write for scannability : don’t require users to read long, continuous blocks of text.
- Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages.
We are trying to avoid swathes of text. We need to architect our announcement so our readers can skip over parts and get straight to the meat.
- Let’s look at an example. Imagine we are writing an announcement to solicit papers for a conference on renewable energy. Let’s start with a high suck factor and write an announcement we can tear apart afterward:
Call for Papers Open
Cranfield Green Alliance is a renewable energy conference that takes place in Cranfield, Bedfordshire. The conference is located at Cranfield University and runs from 10–12 November 2009. The conference covers a range of topics including renewable energy, alternative lifestyles, green cooking, ecological trends, and more. We are now opening up our call for papers and encourage a variety of environmental professionals to submit presentations in their area of expertise. Papers on a range of subjects are welcome and we would encourage you all to submit something soon. The conference attracts a wide range of attendees and exhibitions, and we welcome your involvement in this important event. Your contributions as a visitor or a speaker will be valuable. To submit your paper you should email papers@cranfieldgreenalliance.co.uk no later than 1st October 2009. We look forward to your submissions!
Friends, what we have just experienced is unremarkable, flat, and about as exciting as a paintdrying competition. I am sorry I subjected you to that paragraph: I realize you will never get those minutes back. Consider it a sacrifice for your community. OK, let’s apply some of the guidance we have discussed so far. Let’s make the language exciting and inspirational, break up the paragraph so it is easier to read and scan, and make it succinct and clear. Tighten your seat belts.
Here we go:
Cranfield Green Alliance Call For Papers Open!
10–12 November 2009: Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, England. Leading the way to define a new future fueled by renewable energy. Including exciting and industry-relevant topics such as renewable energy, alternative lifestyles, green cooking, ecological trends, and more. Leaders of the field bring a great opportunity to learn from the finest minds in the industry.
PLAY YOUR PART IN THE REVOLUTION
Do you want to get your voice heard? Do you want to help inspire and encourage a new generation of renewable energy? We thought so. It’s time to submit a paper... Submit a paper on any relevant green topic and deliver it to an audience of over 500 attendees. HOW TO SUBMIT: Send papers to papers@cranfieldgreenalliance.co.uk no later than October 1, 2009!!
Good luck!
In this example we performed a number of steps to brighten our announcement. This included:
- Separating out the key parts of the message into separate headings and paragraphs.
- Converting the language to be more rabble-rousing and inspiring.
- Engaging in a rhetorical dialog with the reader by asking questions and clearly showing that the answer was to submit a paper, which is the very aim of the announcement.
Your announcement page should pass the elevator test: it should get the reader up to speed with what you are announcing within a minute. Let’s get back to our 5-A-Day example. When we were constructing the 5-A-Day announcement, we produced a page that identified the primary concept of 5-A-Day, how people could get involved, and what they needed to do. Each of the different pieces of information had individual headings, and emphasis was used extensively. View the page at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day to see the principles in this section in action—and with a successful outcome.
Review
Postmortems are hugely valuable in any kind of work, and if you don’t perform them, you never learn how to improve. Whether you are evaluating how well you handled a discussion, cooked a meal, taught your kids how to play football, or built community buzz, a review can uncover great opportunities for improvement:
Efficiency When you review your work, it gives you an opportunity to identify areas that are inefficient and redundant. You can use these as a basis for improvement. Feedback Gathering feedback from the people who consumed your buzz is a great way to see what they felt worked and what didn’t. This is a great opportunity to get feedback on your writing, structure, and the other concepts throughout this chapter. Ideas When any kind of postmortem of an approach occurs, it almost always generates new ideas. These will help future buzz cycles to be more effective. In the review phase, revisit the questions you asked in the planning phase and compare the plan with what happened: To make this process effective, you should gather feedback from members of your community. Seek to gather responses from those who will provide you with constructive advice of what worked and what didn’t. Remember, much of the goal here is to identify flaws in your approach. Flaws are nothing to be embarrassed about: they are opportunities to do even better next time.
itnet7/SandBox (last edited 2017-09-19 03:15:55 by itnet7)