WordCamp San Francisco 2009: Cali Lewis on Community Building
By Lorelle VanFossen, posted May 30, 2009 at 5:27 pm | No Comments ยป
Live Blogging from WordCamp San Francisco 2009
Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV is speaking upon community building as an expert of a video blog about tech news, reviews, and commentary.
Rule One – Know Thyself – Know They Blog! You must have value and know who you are and what you are capable of for your blog content. You can get caught up in a Blog Bog – you can’t have passion without a mission. You have to have a core brand value to get you “to the final frontier.” You may have a passion, but without a clear purpose and identity, you can’t go any further.
Rule Two – Start Compelling Conversations! Blogs made it possible for people to find talents they didn’t know they had, it helped give them a voice in world that wasn’t accessible before. Having the option to say anything you want can lead to clutter.
Rule Three – Value. You must offer value to give people a return on their investment of time during their visit to make them return for more. After you have established your core brand value and identity, you have to give them value, to find your audience and get them to come back and return with their friends.
She talked about using TweetDeck to find your audience. Set up columns with one using Twitter Search using keywords or phrases. It turns up all the results of those keywords. This allows you to track those discussing these subjects and participate in the discussion.
Rules Four – Make Friends Not Fans – We don’t talk at our audience in today’s new media. We talk with them. Ask questions, not just give answers. It creates a loyal audience. A loyal audience that wants to tell the world about you, sharing your funny or water cooler stories, so they will encourage others to visit your site.
Those with fans tend to disappoint their fans. Those with friends have a much “healthier” relationship with those who follow their sites. When you can’t access people or talk to them, when your platform is too far away from the people. When you maintain a relationship with others, you get more friends and loyalty.
Get away from the computer. Get face-to-face in addition to the virtual-to-virtual. Have meetups with your local fans when you travel. Listen to your audience. Listen to the opinions coming from everywhere, but you don’t have to act upon it, just listen, and decide for yourself which way to go. Too many cooks spoil the soup.
If you are participating in the community, you are a valuable asset to the community. You have people communicating and interacting, you have to maintain the level, and keep building the interactions. You have to reward participation.
Rule Five – Reward Participation. Giveaways, contests, create incentives for people to come to your blog, it helps the interactivity. When you begin, it might not be possible to attract a lot of people for the contest, but keep working at it. Start building relationships, show appreciation by giving free acknowledgments and appreciations, give away free schwag, blog about them, find a way to give back and move towards higher compensation as your site grows.
Rule Six – Take Breaks! Take a break. Get away. Think television shows. They take time off. Give your audience a chance to miss you. It helps you to come back refreshed with new energy and ideas.
Rule Seven – Always Upgrade. Upgrade your technology, software, services, blog, everything. Always be improving. Be striving for better, and better. Upgrade equipment, but also upgrade quality of content. Evolve. People love watching people grow and change and evolve.
Start with simple, grow slow. Keep learning, keep improving, let the audience see you care by changing with the times and their interests and abilities.
