[MUSIC] Welcome back. We're now going to talk about a real centerpiece to making content strategy work, which is social community engagement. Which, of course, then raises the question, what are social communities? What are the different types? How do we engage them? How do we reach them? How do we find them differentially? And then, what kind of content do we use to make it all work? So, Randy. Let's begin at the beginning. >> All right. >> What are the major types of social communities? >> Well, audiences tend to form communities for two primary reasons. The first one is the passion that they have. In other words, people seek out people just like them to talk about their passions, whether it's I'm really into fashion, or I want to restore motorcycles, or I want to fly a plane, or whatever. Things that really move us to action are the things that are deep, central to our heart. >> But they can be small. I like an author and I want to read a book or. >> That's right. Or a genre of books or whatever. The key is if it's something that's internal to us, it's a passion that we have. And what we do is we seek out other people with a similar passion, and those audiences work in a very specific way. One of the things we find is, regardless of whether it is a professional passion community or a consumer one, just people talking to people. Yeah, that basically they want to talk to individuals. So peer-to-peer communication is very, very central. They're also looking for the newest thing. So if I am into sci-fi magazines, or sci-fi books, I want to know the new authors and who are the up and coming authors, and what are the newest books that are out there, so I can talk about them. But I'll also talk about the tried and true ones as well. And so what we're looking for is the engagement that way. Those communities work in very, very specific ways, as we'll see here in a minute. The other community works exactly the opposite. It is a trigger event community. And trigger events happen when we go into a unique life stage, for example, having a baby, planning retirement, figuring out where we're going to to college, all those good things, first career, buying our first home. Those are all trigger events that move us into action to begin to seek out people, in social, to figure out what we're going to do. We can also have trigger events that are events that happen, an earthquake, a oil spill in the Gulf. Those things also trigger us to action and those sort of events we go to very specific things looking for people. The difference though, is that when we have a passion community, we're looking for people to talk to us and we want to engage both the experts and the peer-to-peer. In a trigger event, we are looking for people, an organization, or whatever who has walked that walk before. In other words, if I'm having a baby I want to go over and talk to people who've had a baby about, what do I have to expect as I go through my trimesters? And so, basically, we're looking for expertise there. We're not interested in talking to other people that are just as clueless as we are. We want to talk to people that know what's going to happen and can help us through that. >> So what are sort of the tips you would give us to maximize and build either one of those communities? >> Well, let's start with the passion. If I'm going after a passion community, the key is they want to have feedback. And so, in my content strategy, I want to think about doing things like blogs, videos, and then asking people to respond to them. Thinking about live chat, maybe having a webinar where people can ask questions of an expert. It's that back and forth, it becomes really, really key. And so, what we want to do is we want to think about, as we're going to engage them, a couple things. First off, what is on the cutting edge? And because people are always looking for the new thing. And so, I would watch the influencers and start to figure out what they're doing. I'd also engage with the influencers very early in my content strategy, because those people are talking to the core of the audience that's in that passion group. And the key is, if I can befriend them, they're going to want to be a participant with me and doing so we'll both reach out to the group. The other thing you need to think about is being very multimedia. People consume content in different ways, and in the passion community, they're going to want to watch videos, they want to read blogs, they want to read articles, they want to participate with other people, and so you think a lot about peer-to-peer engagement. One of them that's a great consumer site is Project Runway. Project Runway is a TV show that evolved itself into a fashion community. And so what you do is that you can watch the TV show, and they actually have an app where you can rate the different designers. They have different designers every season, and they end up with one that is the best designer overall. And so, they have an app where people can sit at home and watch it live and actually put their own post out there, pick the best designer, say who should be kicked off the show, because they kick off one every episode. And so it gets very involved that way. If you go to their website, you're going to find that there's blogs. There's chatrooms, there's talk to the designer so you can talk to each one individually, whoever you'd like. It's a pick the best costume, pick the best outfits, what are the next trends that you see? And so what they're doing is they're constantly asking the community, share, share about what you think, tell us what you think about it. And so that is a hallmark of a really good passion community is that back and forth between the peers. On the business side, or if you will, the organizational side, you can also have passion communities but those are going to be a little bit different. But they're still going to have that peer-to-peer discussion. For example, one of them that I really like is called GlobalSpec. And what they do is it's engineers, only 7 million of them across the world, who are engaging not only to use their service to buy products and services, but more importantly, they have a section called CR4. CR4 is a series of communities that are designed for the engineer, so that if you're a civil engineer you go to one place, if you're a biomedical engineer you go to another place. And there they have communities that are talking about the newest products. They have forums where people can talk to each other, that's that peer-to-peer bit. And so what they do is, they make it really easy for engineers to talk to engineers about engineering issues, and if you're not an engineer, you'll be bored with it. But you log in, and that takes you, you tell them what community you want to be a part of, and now you become a part of that group. [MUSIC]
