Beyond Cats & Kardashians - Building Meaningful Online Engagement
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The document discusses strategies for building meaningful online engagement beyond just focusing on popular superficial content. It emphasizes the difficulty of gaining and sustaining an audience online, and provides tips for setting realistic goals, leveraging existing audiences, optimizing for search and pain points, building relationships with users through various engagement techniques, incentivizing sharing and deeper participation, and maintaining consistency across multiple communication channels. Case studies from the founder's experience growing the civic engagement site GovLoop demonstrate how to provide varied content that meets users' evolving needs while promoting where potential members already spend time online.
Beyond Cats & Kardashians - Building Meaningful Online Engagement
- 1. Beyond Cats & Kardashians How to Build Meaningful Online Engagement
- 2. What’s Popular on the Internet? • Kardashains • Cats • Buzzfeed / Huffpost
- 3. What are you serving? • Buffet of ice cream, you are serving broccoli • How do you get people to eat healthy?
- 4. Hardest thing on internet • Gaining audience / geIng people to care • Billion dollar skill • #1 reason civic engagement (or any consumer internet site) dies is lack of audience
- 5. What is Find and contribute best practices Research the latest trends Solve government ? problems Learn about the latest Connect with peers solutions MISSION: “Connect Government to Improve Government”
- 7. 2 Questions I Think About • How to Grow GovLoop – Reach & Engage – Reach More People (More Active Members) – Increase Engagement (More Activity) – Solve more problems every day
- 8. My Last Year of Research Studied How Others Increased Audience & Engagement • For-profit communities (Dogster, ITToolbox, Sermo, change.org) • For-profit vendors (GroupOn, Hubspot, Priceline,) • Non-profit campaigns (Causes, Charity: Water, NeighborsForNeighbors) • Political sector (Presidential and local elections) • Government (Federal, State, Local)
- 9. What I’ve Learned • It’s REALLY REALLY Hard • There’s a talent/skill • There’s a methodology and rigor • Difference between Doing it and Doing it Well • Lots of optimization opportunities • Hard to be consistent
- 10. Getting Started
- 11. What are your goals? • Who is your target audience realisRcally? • How large is your realisRc target audience? • Where is your audience online? • Where are they offline? Online to offline • Who are the experts/partners in space? • What media outlets cover the space?
- 12. What is realisRc? • What is the size of current groups on topic? • What is the demand for informaRon on topic? • What have past similar projects yielded? • What does success look like? • 90-‐9-‐1 rule • NASA always wins – some issues more catchy
- 13. Key mistakes • UnderesRmate resources it takes to community manage • Failure to simplify the ask • Too opRmisRc of people’s desires
- 14. What’s the topic / pain point?
- 15. Key Tips
- 17. Awareness
- 18. Is their Audience You Can Leverage ExisRng email lists One-‐Rme use of email lists Big accounts in social media to use PR Campaigns Other associaRons People that have incenRve to parRcipate (students, pracRRoner in that field, etc)
- 19. OpRmize for Search / Pain Point
- 20. Embed elsewhere
- 21. Cross-‐Promote where Audience INDUSTRY INDUSTRY: GOVERNMENT: McDonalds: Amazon: Your agency: “Do you want “Customers who “You may also be fries with that?” bought this item interested in informaRon also bought…” from these agencies…”
- 22. Tap into ExisRng Community
- 23. Real World / Simple
- 26. Sign ‘em Up
- 27. Simple Clear Ask
- 30. Show Progress
- 31. How are you On-‐boarding Users?
- 32. Give IncenRve to Share
- 33. Have a Human Voice / Feel
- 34. Framing QuesRons + A/B Tests
- 35. Keep Engaged/ Go Deeper
- 36. Segment Audience -‐ Focus on Engaged
- 37. Unlock Parts of site
- 38. Real IncenRves
- 39. Time Constrained Large Events
- 40. On-‐going vs Once a Year
- 41. Hand to hand combat Write members Call members Comment on their walls Have advisory board calls Biggest challenge emails
- 42. Part of a Movement / Swag
- 44. Regular Frequency Across MulRple Channels • Facebook – 1 to 4X a day • Twiger – 3 to 10X a day • Email – Range from daily, weekly **Key is consistency – actual numbers vary by agency and type of content**
- 45. Lessons from GovLoop • Consistency is key – takes Rme • Search key • Levels of content – broccoli to candy • Focus on what people want – knowledge network, guides, webinars, etc • Needs evolve over Rme – cohort effects • Promote where people are & traffic is – network referral
- 46. What’s popular in gov’t sites? • Crime • Jobs • EducaRon • Weather/snow • DMV, licenses, permits • Transit • Items that affects people individually
- 47. Civic Sites that get lots of traffic • MySociety & Google • Potholes • DMV.org • Greatschools
- 48. Ways to Engage w/ GovLoop Always looking for stories to highlight Free guides & trainings Ask questions, write a blog Always willing to help w/ strategy, development, execution Have students? Have GovLoop fellows
- 49. Reach out Steve Ressler Founder, GovLoop [email protected] @GovLoop