One of our commenters — Derek Scruggs from Enthusiast Group — sent me a preview version of his company’s white paper yesterday. It’s a pretty neat piece of work with a lot of interesting case studies and some excellent tips. Here are some points of interest that stood out to me as I read through:
1. The report cites Mack Collier of the Viral Garden’s July 2006 blog post where he wrote about how Fiskars — a manufacturer of scissors popular with scrapbookers — empowered their online community to share their scrapbooking projects.
Mack Collier of the Viral Garden blog wrote of the Fiskateers social network that it is powerful because the marketers (the Fiskateers) are marketing to the same community that they are members of. “All it took was Fiskars being smart enough to find these passionate community members, then empowering them to market for them.”
2. The rise of the soft sell. They cite the case of the We are Ellis Island site where marketers work make people feel comfortable. The site drives copious tee-shirt sales by simply existing and sharing stories about their personal connection to this historical monument.
3. As college students and early adopters become more exasperated with all the high schoolers, old people and general MySpaceification of Facebook, Playboy is seeking to cash in. They’ve created a social network for college students — and other holders of coveted .edu e-mail addresses — to come in from the cold.
If potential employers were freaked out about photos of graduating seniors doing keg stands posted on Facebook, how will they feel about anyone having a profile on a social network hosted by Playboy? True, the site is “non-nude” but Playboy is and always has been a purveyor of pornography first and foremost. I certainly can’t see it being the next LinkedIn, which is probably why college students will wind up flocking to it.
4. They provide a list of ten top recommendations for creating a solid online community engagement strategy. The shortened version of these recommendations is to be human, be ethical, be transparent and accept the loss of control inherent to the social medium.
I hope I’ve done a decent job of summarizing the bright spots in this report, but they were honestly too numerous to get them all down here. I hope you’ll all consider downloading the white paper. Or if you’d rather, you might want to consider listening to it. I used iSpeakit to transform the white paper into a sound file that I listened to on my iPhone while I was driving home from an editorial development meeting.
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