Executive Summary
Community In A Box in 3 Words & 4 Slides:
Community In A Box in 3 Words & 4 Slides:
* Heroes
* Games
* Adventure
HEROES - Resume vs Eulogy Lives & Hero Marketing
Watch David Brooks explain the difference between Resume and Eulogy lives. Is your marketing "resume marketing" or eulogy worthy, disruptive, cool, have to talk about it? If you aren't a hero in YOUR OWN MIND how can you or your marketing be a hero for customers?
Watch David Brooks explain the difference between Resume and Eulogy lives. Is your marketing "resume marketing" or eulogy worthy, disruptive, cool, have to talk about it? If you aren't a hero in YOUR OWN MIND how can you or your marketing be a hero for customers?
Games - Content Gamification
Is your content a GAME? Are your readers wondering what will happen next? Moon-Audio.com knows how to make their content a game. They ask customers to hunt for dragon eggs and increase engagement, sales, loyalty and love.
Moon-Audio.com knows how to make content a game.
Is Your Content An Adventure?
Does your content create community as it wins hearts, minds and loyalty like Scoop.It, Medium or Facebook? Is your job CURATION more than CREATION? Listening more than talking? Welcome to the new digital, connected, emotional, individual, tribal, and chaotic digital marketing world.
Does your content create community as it wins hearts, minds and loyalty like Scoop.It, Medium or Facebook? Is your job CURATION more than CREATION? Listening more than talking? Welcome to the new digital, connected, emotional, individual, tribal, and chaotic digital marketing world.
Community In A Box in more than 3 Slides
Community In A Box - Why?
* What Is Community In A Box (CIAB)?
* Why CIAB Helps - Non-SEO?
* Why CIAB Help with the New SEO?
What Is Community In A Box (CIAB)?
* Bring "Pillars" of Online Community Together In A Single App
* Pillars include tools, contests, and games geared to promote User Generated Content (UGC)
* Pillars of online community include, but aren't limited to:
** Sense of Safety (Read Safety Note for more)
** Public and Managed User Profiles
** Forums
** Q&A "knowledge base"
** Crowdfunding
** Blogging
** Easy Communication with Site Managers
** Communicate and Follow other "Like Me" subscribers
** Ability to form tribes
** Gamification (social not monetary rewards, feedback and legitimacy or recognition"
Safety Online
Like most things, online safety is different than real world safety. Online safety is FELT too but created differently.
Online safety is created by:
* Seeing friends and others "like you" on a site
* Having "like you" content shared on a site
* Easily finding "safety signals" such as "rules" and "asks" (for help)
* Watching and hearing about a site from trusted sources
* Have some control over and the ability to manipulate who sees what
* Reading or watching About Us content
* Seeing evidence of "Digitally Listens" (following back, UGC valued, customers featured)
* Site content is connected to "Essential Questions"
Facebook as Safe & Distracting Platform
Facebook feels safe and is a great example of the power of community and "platforming". With over a billion users Facebook's traffic rivals Google's. Customer content on YOUR platform (website) is key to success today SEO or NO SEO. Transforming your "website" into a platform is a digital marketing CSF (Critical Success Factor).
Filter bubbles and Facebook would be a BIG one, make it hard for NEW IDEAS (such as your brands, websites and content) to reach, inspire and engage new customers.
Friends Are CSFs & Hard To Reach
Watch Eli Pariser's talk on "filter bubbles" on TED for a glance into how hard reaching your core customer and creating a market is these days. Your brand, company or site's friends reaching out their friends on your behalf is a "Critical Success Factor" (CSF) for digital marketing today.
Watch Eli Pariser's talk on "filter bubbles" on TED for a glance into how hard reaching your core customer and creating a market is these days. Your brand, company or site's friends reaching out their friends on your behalf is a "Critical Success Factor" (CSF) for digital marketing today.
If you sell anything you already know how difficult finding new customers has become. Today, we sell by proxy - our brand or company's friends sell to their friends. Stories are the means of exchange. Stories creates content confirming "safety", inspiring collaboration, and prompting a desire to JOIN.
Essential Questions or "Hero Marketing"
Marketing that doesn't help customers think about "essential questions" is doomed these noisy days. Essential Questions are the BIG EMOTIONAL questions such as,
* Why am I HERE?
* Do I MATTER?
* Why am I HERE?
* Do I MATTER?
* What is the meaning of life?
Unanswerable Questions Together
People are smarter together than alone. We know some "essential questions" are unanswerable. They are "journey" not destination questions. We want to journey with people "like us". We want to find and contribute to online communities where our passions are valued, where we are HEARD, recognized and rewarded (socially more than money).
Learning & Community
As the online content marketing bar goes up customers expect authenticity. They trust their friends, family, and followers, the most. The web makes learning about anything EASY and learning together possible and easy.
Digital brands must GROW or die. There is no "standing still" or "milking" today.
Ask For Help
One of the best ways to prove you, your brands, company and website "digitally listen" is to ASK FOR HELP. Placing a high value on support received after asking for help begins collaboration and is another pillar of an online community.
One of the best ways to prove you, your brands, company and website "digitally listen" is to ASK FOR HELP. Placing a high value on support received after asking for help begins collaboration and is another pillar of an online community.
Irony? Yes and that is why few marketers realize the importance of being "vulnerable" enough to ask for help.
Know your brand to learn how to ask for help online. Is your brand joyful? Does your brand promote exploration? Does your brand change the world? Yes should be the answer to all those questions, but learning how to align your brand with how customers think of it and by extension you creates the difference between good and great digital marketing.
Knowing where your brand fit's in Jim Stengel's Brand Ideals is crucial.
Growing By 5 "Ideals"
In his great book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth at the World's Largest Companies Jim Stengel shares 5 memes brands align with including:
In his great book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth at the World's Largest Companies Jim Stengel shares 5 memes brands align with including:
Eliciting Joy: Activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility.
Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with each other and the world in meaningful ways.
Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore new horizons and new experiences.
Evoking Pride: Giving people increased confidence, strength, security, and vitality.
Impacting Society: Affecting society broadly, including by challenging the status quo and redefining categories.
Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with each other and the world in meaningful ways.
Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore new horizons and new experiences.
Evoking Pride: Giving people increased confidence, strength, security, and vitality.
Impacting Society: Affecting society broadly, including by challenging the status quo and redefining categories.
Apple is an "Inspires Exploration" brand, but these days, thanks to the web ALL BRANDS inspire exploration IF and WHEN websites include engaged, curated, and gamified communities - and that is why we are developing Community In A Box.
No SEO
If your site already has as many loyal followers organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may not be as important as creating content customers want to engage with, follow, and contribute to creating active and rich collaboration between website, brands, and advocates.
If your site already has as many loyal followers organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may not be as important as creating content customers want to engage with, follow, and contribute to creating active and rich collaboration between website, brands, and advocates.
Other Conversion Metrics
Sites and brands with a loyal following may be more interested in other "engagement" metrics such as Time on Site, Pages Viewed, and conversions or sales / traffic. Community In A Box helps engage your customers creating "Content Gamification" where you content is a game and supporting Friends of Friends marketing through Ambassadors.
Sites and brands with a loyal following may be more interested in other "engagement" metrics such as Time on Site, Pages Viewed, and conversions or sales / traffic. Community In A Box helps engage your customers creating "Content Gamification" where you content is a game and supporting Friends of Friends marketing through Ambassadors.
SEO
If Search Engine Optimization is important your content marketing needs help in two key areas: inbound links and content freshness or QDF (Quality Deserves Freshness). Your content can't have too many quality inbound links nor can your site's content be "too fresh".
CIAB helps generate more inbound links and helps "freshen" your site's content marketing.
Link Efficiency Index (LEI)
Google is making it clear - more content no one cares about is NOT the answer. Do more of the same thing and expect a different Google result and you will be disappointed and risk lowering existing Google benchmarks.
THEIR (customer) content on YOUR website = social shares and links
There is no better way to support content than sharing your brand's, website's and company's legitimacy. Community In A Box (CIAB) helps mine User Generated Content (UGC) from HOT (fresh) and Evergreen content.
There is no better way to support content than sharing your brand's, website's and company's legitimacy. Community In A Box (CIAB) helps mine User Generated Content (UGC) from HOT (fresh) and Evergreen content.
Quality Deserves Freshness
Best QDF post we've read is from SEO Pressor: http://seopressor.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-google-freshness-algorithm/. The core idea is easy to grasp - fresh content beats "stale" content. Their matrix of Fresh vs Evergreen content in the table below helps to understand QDF and content marketing.
Best QDF post we've read is from SEO Pressor: http://seopressor.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-google-freshness-algorithm/. The core idea is easy to grasp - fresh content beats "stale" content. Their matrix of Fresh vs Evergreen content in the table below helps to understand QDF and content marketing.
If QDF so Important Why does an OLD (2009) post missing a video from Moz.com win?
I'm logged into Google Plus as you can see from my picture above right. That is why our company's website shows up just above a post I shared on GPlus. Google's search results factor QDF AND many other factors such as authority and reputation. That is why an old Moz.com post missing a video, something Google's search spider doesn't know or understand, outranks a newer and better SEOPressor.com post.
To vastly over simplify, Moz.com's old post has more and better quality inbound links and their "old" content is still "fresher" by virtue of all that support FOR ME. Thanks to Google's "filter bubble" what you and I see when we type the same search at the same time may be different.
Google's Algorithm
Google factors 200 metrics into their ranking algorithm. They "float" the results feeding me what they deem "most relevant".
Not provided comes from the example shared above. When a searcher is logged into Google as I was their search information, unless cookied by your site, is cloaked in "not provided".
Google factors 200 metrics into their ranking algorithm. They "float" the results feeding me what they deem "most relevant".
Not provided comes from the example shared above. When a searcher is logged into Google as I was their search information, unless cookied by your site, is cloaked in "not provided".
Good Assumptions
Even with as hard as Google makes it to KNOW anything we can ASSUME:
* More links from quality sites beat fewer links
* Fresher content beats stale
Those two marketing assumptions create a need for a fully gamified online community or Community In A Box.
Community Benefits
* Brand Ambassadors help with number and quality of inbound links
* Ambassadors keep content fresh with comments, reviews, contests, games and UGC
* User Generated Content comes with friends-of-friends outreach built in (they will alert their friends)
* Help define & keep brands current
* Lower costs as more quality content created with less work / costs
* No one climbs today's digital marketing Everest alone, need army of SHERPAS to help
* Community sites sell more because "like me" groups form and sell each other
* Transform "website" into "platform" (i.e. more Facebook-like)
Why vs How
CIAB uses tools such as forums, a Q&A knowledge base, and wikis to help Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) align with customers.
No one climbs up today's digital marketing Everest alone. Sherpas (Ambassadors) and community create the difference between surviving and thriving in today's "new SEO" world.
Thriving is producing $10 tor $1 (minimum) return on invested capital and time while beating the ticking "Community Shock" clock. You don't want to be the 5th website in your business category asking for help and for customers to join your online community and "movement".
Thriving is producing $10 tor $1 (minimum) return on invested capital and time while beating the ticking "Community Shock" clock. You don't want to be the 5th website in your business category asking for help and for customers to join your online community and "movement".
Prime Movers Only - Beating Community Shock
We aren't trying to sell used cars in Community Shock and Community Shock Redux. Think about Mark Schaefer's "content shock" and apply the same "too much content chasing too little community" logic.
How Many Communities?
How many online communities do you actively contribute to? I do this, web marketing, for a living and I consistently contribute to Scoop.it, GPlus, Medium, Twitter, Flipboard, and Moon-Audio.com. We bet 5 - 7 communities is the maximum number (of communities) most people can consistently contribute and collaborate with.
Have you heard anyone complaining about too much free time lately? We bet not.
Lead, Follow AND Get Out of the Way
CIAB helps you, your company, website, and brands be a leader in What's Next in your industry. We launch Moon-Audio.com's CIAB in July. If you like to wait, you can check back then. If you like to lead contact martin(at)Curagami.com and we can find a way to help you beat Community Shock in your industry.
CIAB helps you, your company, website, and brands be a leader in What's Next in your industry. We launch Moon-Audio.com's CIAB in July. If you like to wait, you can check back then. If you like to lead contact martin(at)Curagami.com and we can find a way to help you beat Community Shock in your industry.
