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| == The Buzz Cycle == | == Buzz Targets == |
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| 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. | Buzz needs a target, and that target is the topic you are focusing on. Each time you steal away someone’s attention, she needs to know that it was worth it. You want to ensure that when someone looks in your direction, she feels it was worthwhile. To do this, you need to decide what you want to promote. Of course, buzz is an ongoing process: you will need to bring attention and focus to your community many, many times. Each of these times you need to ensure there is a purpose. Whether the purpose is announcing the community, attracting new members, or anything else, you should ensure that your goals and intentions are clear. |
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| The four stages are: | Two kinds of buzz campaigns are useful in virtually all communities: |
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| '''''Planning''''' | * The initial announcement. * Ongoing efforts to attract members. |
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| Sitting down and building a recipe for what you want to achieve, how you can achieve it, and what is involved. |
We are going to explore both of these, looking at the four elements of the buzz cycle. |
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| '''''Buildup''''' | == Announcing Your Community == |
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| 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. | The very first time you need buzz is when you announce your community. The goal is to get the message out among people who can contribute to your community, pique people’s interest, and get them to learn more. Your announcement should appear fresh and exciting, and an effective buildup phase is particularly important. Earlier I gave examples of the approach to announcing The Art of Community and 5-A-Day; you should consider similar approaches. Multimedia can make an announcement more exciting and memorable. Lawrence Lessig launched his Change Congress (http://change-congress.org/ ) campaign on his blog (http://www.lessig.org/blog/2008/03/change_congress_launched.html) by recording a short online presentation in which he narrated the goals of the project. I used a similar technique when I announced my Severed Fifth (http://www.severedfifth.com/ ) project. I recorded an announcement (http://www.severedfifth.com/news/2008/06/severed-fifth-launched/ ) and put it online on the day of release. These approaches really help captivate the viewer. The desired outcome with this kind of buzz is to have people visit your website and to spread awareness of your community. |
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| '''''Announce''''' | == Applying the buzz cycle == |
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| The core of our buzz, this is where we kick it out there. | '''Preparation''' |
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| '''''Review''''' | Ensure you have your website in place, and that all of the key information about your community and how to get involved is available. You should also ensure syndication feeds are available. Decide where it’s important to get mentioned (websites, magazines, personal blogs by leaders in the field, and so forth). You can often source a list of places by asking your community and identifying related websites and magazines. |
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| 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. |
'''Buildup''' |
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| 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. | If you have a preexisting blog or other site where you can post content, you could post “Coming Soon...” messages. If you are setting up a local community, you could put up fliers with the date of the announcement and a web address. |
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| == Planning == | '''Announcement''' |
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| 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: |
On the date of the announcement, you should publicize in all the communication channels that make sense. You should provide a short blurb that inspires people to learn about your community and encourage them to visit your website. |
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| * 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? |
'''Review''' |
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| 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. |
You can see where your announcement spread to and whether you were publicized in all the places you hoped. There’s also qualitative feedback: did comments and questions show that you described your project clearly? Did the types of people you want respond? |
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| == Attracting Contributors == | |
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| '''''DEADLINES KEEP YOU ALIVE'''''' | Contributors are at the forefront of what makes a great community. They are not only on the front line furthering your community in the direction of its goals, but they are also your representatives and spokespeople. |
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| 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. | Although buzz campaigns can be started to attract contributors, this activity should be seen as an always-present and ongoing promotional effort. Your goal here is to constantly communicate the positive message of your community, its achievements, and how people can get involved. The greatest communicators of this message are your existing members: you want to turn their satisfaction into active promotion for your community. To achieve this, your members need to feel proud to be in your community. They should feel a drive and passion for your goals and objectives, and they should feel that they want to spread the word so others can enjoy the community too. A positive community will always generate a positive message and be a magnet for new contributors. The first step in achieving this is to build a sense of enjoyment, ease of contribution, and pride in your members. You build this by combining the elements discussed in this book: simple processes, effective governance, transparency, and so on. When you get these core attributes right, your members will thrive on the opportunities and direction that your community offers them. You now need to encourage them to share their happiness and drive with others. Their own resources and social network are an excellent communication channel for this outreach. Your job is to identify methods via which you can help them use these resources to spread the word about (a) the good work your community performs, and (b) why they enjoy being part of it. |
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| 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. | For the former, give them buttons for their websites and blogs. Give them posters to print out and put in libraries, in stores, and on lampposts. Provide them with email signatures that they can use. Encourage them to set up Facebook/MySpace pages and more. Each of these resources should direct people back to the community’s website. To encourage your members to share their joy of being a part of the community, the key is that the communication focuses on the personal story: you need to encourage your members to share what they specifically enjoy about the project. In doing this you resort to the essence of community that we discussed back at the beginning of the book: stories. |
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| == Buildup == | Stories are a fantastic viral marketing asset. A great story is never told once; it is shared again and again. If your community members share great stories about their involvement in the community, the stories will travel far and wide and encourage new and unknown people to dip their feet into your waters. You should talk about the importance of sharing stories with your members. Help them to understand that on any given day they could talk to someone online, in a coffee shop, or on a train or plane and potentially inspire someone to join the community. This can provide your members with a powerful sense of opportunity for bringing people in and will get them involved. You should now augment this discussion with some specific recommendations of viral approaches of getting the word out there: |
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| 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. |
'''Blogging''' |
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| 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. | Blog entries get read, linked, and passed on across the Internet. They are easy to create, accessible to all, and are permanently archived in search engines and often crop up in random searches. Blog entries are also very gratifying for the author, particularly if the readers leave comments. |
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| (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.) | '''Microblogging''' |
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| 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. |
Earlier we discussed tools such as Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook as excellent methods of sharing experiences: encourage your members to use these facilities as they do their work. |
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| 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. | '''Word of mouth''' |
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| NOTE | Encourage your members to strike up conversations about your community in every possible scenario. Glorify the most insane and ridiculous cases in which a story is told and the recipient joins the community. As an example, one time I met a guy on the London Underground and told him about Ubuntu. He visited the website and eventually joined |
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| 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. | and participated in the community. This was incredibly satisfying. Share these experiences, and encourage and celebrate them. |
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| == Announce == | '''Interviews''' |
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| 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. | Some of your community members may have the opportunity to be interviewed on websites, podcasts, videocasts, or in magazines. These are harder to come by, but encourage your members to ask these publications if they can be interviewed. If you don’t ask, you don’t get! |
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| 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. | '''Conference presentations''' |
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| 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. |
If you have members who are keen to speak at conferences, encourage them to submit papers. If you have some experience of this process, you should offer them help and advice on putting together a submission. |
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| 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. | '''Meetings/events/open days''' |
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| 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: | You should encourage your members to organize meetings and events in which they can tell their story about the community. When I first got involved in open source, I organized presentations and open events at my university to help others understand how fun and satisfying our community is. All it needed was a room and a projector, and planting the idea in the minds of your members is sure to inspire some to organize an event. An important element in building buzz to attract contributors is to showcase great work. I used many of these techniques when I started Severed Fifth and provided a range of website buttons and Severed Fifth posters (many of which were produced by the community). To generate buzz, I organized a campaign for fans to put the posters and stickers up in their local area. As part of the campaign, I encouraged typical destinations for the posters such as music shops, notice boards, and lampposts, but also showcased some of the wackier places. I saw examples of Severed Fifth stickers and posters in fish and chip shops, on the London Underground, in railway stations, toilet stalls, concert venues, buses, and even stuck to someone who was sleeping. As I heard these stories, I blogged them and encouraged fans to send me photos that I could put on the blog. The viral nature of the campaign encouraged more people to participate. |
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| * 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. |
This viral marketing approach to building buzz has become the new way of doing business on the Internet. The idea is simple: you build buzz and encourage the consumers of your buzz to also build their buzz on the same topic. With this approach, when you unleash something on this network of viral volunteers, it spreads like wildfire. The key here is having this network available, and building that network can require a tremendous amount of energy in helping people to feel engaged, but when they do it will pay dividends in buzz. The key is in making people feel a sense of empowerment and responsibility to spread the message. |
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| 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. | An interesting project that really set the standard for this kind of outreach was the Mozilla Firefox promotional campaign, Spread Firefox (http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ ). Back in November 2004, the SilverOrange Canadian web firm was commissioned to build Mozilla’s website. As part of their work they produced an evangelist application on their intranet to manage the structure and content of the site. Blake Ross (one of the forefathers of Firefox) conceived the idea that Mozilla should encourage and inspire the global Firefox community to lead the marketing for the launch of the popular browser. One of the people involved in this work was Chris Messina. At the time, Chris was a Firefox community member, keen to see the project get better recognition and more widespread focus. Eventually he would go on to lead the Spread Firefox community marketing project in raising over $220,000 in micro-donations to launch Firefox to a worldwide audience with an ad in the New York Times. |
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| Chris remembers the formation of the project well: | |
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| 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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| Call for Papers Open | "Originally there were probably about 30 of us in this private intranet, but maybe only 10 of us participated in any regular capacity. For me, this kind of work was all new to me—both open source and this kind of semi-anonymous Internet collaboration. It’s not like I’d met anyone on the project personally—in fact, I only happened to find out about it because Steven Garrity had blogged that Mozilla was looking for volunteer designers." |
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| 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 <<MailTo(papers AT cranfieldgreenalliance DOT co DOT uk, Call For Papers)>> no later than 1st October 2009. We look forward to your submissions! |
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| 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. |
After hearing about the project, Chris joined and applied his passion for Firefox to the campaign. At the heart of buzz is the ability to think outside the box to spread the work, and Chris remembers the approaches they used intimately: |
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| Here we go: | ---- |
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| Cranfield Green Alliance Call For Papers Open! | "I think there were a number of important elements of this, and that was that we made it fun to get involved. There was both a spirit of camaraderie and of shared purpose (fighting Microsoft), and with that in mind, people came up with some pretty clever ideas in the forums, contributing concepts, strategies, designs... telling the story of how Firefox made a difference to them. We worked hard to promote these efforts through things like the leaderboard (which measured the week-to-week growth in downloads from different affiliate links) and had, I believe, weekly contests or initiatives. Probably the most effective tool was the cumulative download counter... every time we hit a new milestone I would design new artwork to commemorate our success with each design getting more and more insane." |
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| 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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| PLAY YOUR PART IN THE REVOLUTION | The efforts of the Spread Firefox team were exceptional: Firefox 3 was downloaded over 28 million times in 24 hours when it was released. The project has gone on to secure a global user base and a reputation for quality, and a thriving and active community that surrounds it. |
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| 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!! | == Preparation == |
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| Good luck! | You should fully research which media you want to spread your buzz to. Your aim here is to identify the kind of personality that will be interested in joining your community, and to target the media that they read. |
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| In this example we performed a number of steps to brighten our announcement. This included: | '''Buildup''' |
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| * 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. |
I would not recommend any buildup to this target. You want to get straight out there and grab contributors. |
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| '''Announcement''' | |
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| 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. | The announcement should take place in a variety of media. Your aim here is to share and inspire people in the achievements and accessibility of your community. Sell them on the evidence: show them third-party statements and material that firmly demonstrates that your community is a fun and rewarding place to be. |
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| == Review == | '''Review''' |
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| 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: * 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? 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. |
Naturally, one measure of success is how many new people sign up or start helping out on committees. You can also try to see how many existing members helped the buzz with their personal statements, and why they were or were not comfortable doing so. |
From The Art Of Community by O'Reilly (http://www.artofcommunityonline.org) by Jono Bacon
Buzz Targets
Buzz needs a target, and that target is the topic you are focusing on. Each time you steal away someone’s attention, she needs to know that it was worth it. You want to ensure that when someone looks in your direction, she feels it was worthwhile. To do this, you need to decide what you want to promote. Of course, buzz is an ongoing process: you will need to bring attention and focus to your community many, many times. Each of these times you need to ensure there is a purpose. Whether the purpose is announcing the community, attracting new members, or anything else, you should ensure that your goals and intentions are clear.
Two kinds of buzz campaigns are useful in virtually all communities:
- The initial announcement.
- Ongoing efforts to attract members.
We are going to explore both of these, looking at the four elements of the buzz cycle.
Announcing Your Community
The very first time you need buzz is when you announce your community. The goal is to get the message out among people who can contribute to your community, pique people’s interest, and get them to learn more. Your announcement should appear fresh and exciting, and an effective buildup phase is particularly important. Earlier I gave examples of the approach to announcing The Art of Community and 5-A-Day; you should consider similar approaches. Multimedia can make an announcement more exciting and memorable. Lawrence Lessig launched his Change Congress (http://change-congress.org/ ) campaign on his blog (http://www.lessig.org/blog/2008/03/change_congress_launched.html) by recording a short online presentation in which he narrated the goals of the project. I used a similar technique when I announced my Severed Fifth (http://www.severedfifth.com/ ) project. I recorded an announcement (http://www.severedfifth.com/news/2008/06/severed-fifth-launched/ ) and put it online on the day of release. These approaches really help captivate the viewer. The desired outcome with this kind of buzz is to have people visit your website and to spread awareness of your community.
Applying the buzz cycle
Preparation
Ensure you have your website in place, and that all of the key information about your community and how to get involved is available. You should also ensure syndication feeds are available. Decide where it’s important to get mentioned (websites, magazines, personal blogs by leaders in the field, and so forth). You can often source a list of places by asking your community and identifying related websites and magazines.
Buildup
If you have a preexisting blog or other site where you can post content, you could post “Coming Soon...” messages. If you are setting up a local community, you could put up fliers with the date of the announcement and a web address.
Announcement
On the date of the announcement, you should publicize in all the communication channels that make sense. You should provide a short blurb that inspires people to learn about your community and encourage them to visit your website.
Review
You can see where your announcement spread to and whether you were publicized in all the places you hoped. There’s also qualitative feedback: did comments and questions show that you described your project clearly? Did the types of people you want respond?
Attracting Contributors
Contributors are at the forefront of what makes a great community. They are not only on the front line furthering your community in the direction of its goals, but they are also your representatives and spokespeople.
Although buzz campaigns can be started to attract contributors, this activity should be seen as an always-present and ongoing promotional effort. Your goal here is to constantly communicate the positive message of your community, its achievements, and how people can get involved. The greatest communicators of this message are your existing members: you want to turn their satisfaction into active promotion for your community. To achieve this, your members need to feel proud to be in your community. They should feel a drive and passion for your goals and objectives, and they should feel that they want to spread the word so others can enjoy the community too. A positive community will always generate a positive message and be a magnet for new contributors. The first step in achieving this is to build a sense of enjoyment, ease of contribution, and pride in your members. You build this by combining the elements discussed in this book: simple processes, effective governance, transparency, and so on. When you get these core attributes right, your members will thrive on the opportunities and direction that your community offers them. You now need to encourage them to share their happiness and drive with others. Their own resources and social network are an excellent communication channel for this outreach. Your job is to identify methods via which you can help them use these resources to spread the word about (a) the good work your community performs, and (b) why they enjoy being part of it.
For the former, give them buttons for their websites and blogs. Give them posters to print out and put in libraries, in stores, and on lampposts. Provide them with email signatures that they can use. Encourage them to set up Facebook/MySpace pages and more. Each of these resources should direct people back to the community’s website. To encourage your members to share their joy of being a part of the community, the key is that the communication focuses on the personal story: you need to encourage your members to share what they specifically enjoy about the project. In doing this you resort to the essence of community that we discussed back at the beginning of the book: stories.
Stories are a fantastic viral marketing asset. A great story is never told once; it is shared again and again. If your community members share great stories about their involvement in the community, the stories will travel far and wide and encourage new and unknown people to dip their feet into your waters. You should talk about the importance of sharing stories with your members. Help them to understand that on any given day they could talk to someone online, in a coffee shop, or on a train or plane and potentially inspire someone to join the community. This can provide your members with a powerful sense of opportunity for bringing people in and will get them involved. You should now augment this discussion with some specific recommendations of viral approaches of getting the word out there:
Blogging
Blog entries get read, linked, and passed on across the Internet. They are easy to create, accessible to all, and are permanently archived in search engines and often crop up in random searches. Blog entries are also very gratifying for the author, particularly if the readers leave comments.
Microblogging
Earlier we discussed tools such as Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook as excellent methods of sharing experiences: encourage your members to use these facilities as they do their work.
Word of mouth
Encourage your members to strike up conversations about your community in every possible scenario. Glorify the most insane and ridiculous cases in which a story is told and the recipient joins the community. As an example, one time I met a guy on the London Underground and told him about Ubuntu. He visited the website and eventually joined
- and participated in the community. This was incredibly satisfying. Share these
experiences, and encourage and celebrate them.
Interviews
Some of your community members may have the opportunity to be interviewed on websites, podcasts, videocasts, or in magazines. These are harder to come by, but encourage your members to ask these publications if they can be interviewed. If you don’t ask, you don’t get!
Conference presentations
If you have members who are keen to speak at conferences, encourage them to submit papers. If you have some experience of this process, you should offer them help and advice on putting together a submission.
Meetings/events/open days
You should encourage your members to organize meetings and events in which they can tell their story about the community. When I first got involved in open source, I organized presentations and open events at my university to help others understand how fun and satisfying our community is. All it needed was a room and a projector, and planting the idea in the minds of your members is sure to inspire some to organize an event. An important element in building buzz to attract contributors is to showcase great work. I used many of these techniques when I started Severed Fifth and provided a range of website buttons and Severed Fifth posters (many of which were produced by the community). To generate buzz, I organized a campaign for fans to put the posters and stickers up in their local area. As part of the campaign, I encouraged typical destinations for the posters such as music shops, notice boards, and lampposts, but also showcased some of the wackier places. I saw examples of Severed Fifth stickers and posters in fish and chip shops, on the London Underground, in railway stations, toilet stalls, concert venues, buses, and even stuck to someone who was sleeping. As I heard these stories, I blogged them and encouraged fans to send me photos that I could put on the blog. The viral nature of the campaign encouraged more people to participate.
This viral marketing approach to building buzz has become the new way of doing business on the Internet. The idea is simple: you build buzz and encourage the consumers of your buzz to also build their buzz on the same topic. With this approach, when you unleash something on this network of viral volunteers, it spreads like wildfire. The key here is having this network available, and building that network can require a tremendous amount of energy in helping people to feel engaged, but when they do it will pay dividends in buzz. The key is in making people feel a sense of empowerment and responsibility to spread the message.
An interesting project that really set the standard for this kind of outreach was the Mozilla Firefox promotional campaign, Spread Firefox (http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ ). Back in November 2004, the SilverOrange Canadian web firm was commissioned to build Mozilla’s website. As part of their work they produced an evangelist application on their intranet to manage the structure and content of the site. Blake Ross (one of the forefathers of Firefox) conceived the idea that Mozilla should encourage and inspire the global Firefox community to lead the marketing for the launch of the popular browser. One of the people involved in this work was Chris Messina. At the time, Chris was a Firefox community member, keen to see the project get better recognition and more widespread focus. Eventually he would go on to lead the Spread Firefox community marketing project in raising over $220,000 in micro-donations to launch Firefox to a worldwide audience with an ad in the New York Times.
Chris remembers the formation of the project well:
- "Originally there were probably about 30 of us in this private intranet, but maybe only 10 of us participated in any regular capacity. For me, this kind of work was all new to me—both open source and this kind of semi-anonymous Internet collaboration. It’s not like I’d met anyone on the project personally—in fact, I only happened to find out about it because Steven Garrity had blogged that Mozilla was looking for volunteer designers."
After hearing about the project, Chris joined and applied his passion for Firefox to the campaign. At the heart of buzz is the ability to think outside the box to spread the work, and Chris remembers the approaches they used intimately:
- "I think there were a number of important elements of this, and that was that we made it fun to get involved. There was both a spirit of camaraderie and of shared purpose (fighting Microsoft), and with that in mind, people came up with some pretty clever ideas in the forums, contributing concepts, strategies, designs... telling the story of how Firefox made a difference to them. We worked hard to promote these efforts through things like the leaderboard (which measured the week-to-week growth in downloads from different affiliate links) and had, I believe, weekly contests or initiatives. Probably the most effective tool was the cumulative download counter... every time we hit a new milestone I would design new artwork to commemorate our success with each design getting more and more insane."
The efforts of the Spread Firefox team were exceptional: Firefox 3 was downloaded over 28 million times in 24 hours when it was released. The project has gone on to secure a global user base and a reputation for quality, and a thriving and active community that surrounds it.
Preparation
You should fully research which media you want to spread your buzz to. Your aim here is to identify the kind of personality that will be interested in joining your community, and to target the media that they read.
Buildup
I would not recommend any buildup to this target. You want to get straight out there and grab contributors.
Announcement
The announcement should take place in a variety of media. Your aim here is to share and inspire people in the achievements and accessibility of your community. Sell them on the evidence: show them third-party statements and material that firmly demonstrates that your community is a fun and rewarding place to be.
Review
Naturally, one measure of success is how many new people sign up or start helping out on committees. You can also try to see how many existing members helped the buzz with their personal statements, and why they were or were not comfortable doing so.
itnet7/SandBox (last edited 2017-09-19 03:15:55 by itnet7)