Some thoughts on different types of advocates and communities

Photo by Niall Kennedy on Flickr.

The happy end result of most ‘community building’ processes is an army of advocates. These enthusiasts recruit new members, keep the community healthy and lively, take responsibility for its daily operations and – if you’re lucky – attract funding and publicity.

The advocate – or enthusiast – in a well-designed project is the pinnacle of the community building efforts. It might take years for an army of advocates to develop. I call these advocates the “raised advocate”, as they’re raised by the community.

Because of their PR strength and their potential to attract new members to communities, people have been trying to start communities with some advocates already in place. Often, these people are paid in money (think Hollywood actors) or rewards (iPads are popular) for advocate-like behaviour.

There’s no denying the strength of Angelina Jolie or Al Gore promoting your cause, but in online projects and new media minded settings, I’ve seen and experienced some challenges with “bought advocates”. Read the rest of this entry »

What makes visitors come (back)?

Photo by Omar Bárcena on Flickr.

Here’s the textbook example of the development of something online AD 2011. It’s a post on this blog, but in my experience represents most of our online work. In this example, exactly seven days separate launch and oblivion.

Fortunately, the fate of one post does not represent the fate of this blog (or you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?). I write another post, and another, and tweet, and write another post, and tweet. As long as I keep pushing out new content (and preferably a lot) I will not be forgotten.

Having people return to our websites has been one of the things we’ve done some work on at the Museum of National History. Our online KPIs put quite some significance on return rates, loyalty, brand awareness, successful registrations, etc.

The dynamics of returning visitors are completely different from those of new visitors. On innl.nl in Q2, return visitors visited 35% more pages, spent 74% more time and were roughly 26% more likely to visit content pages (rather than ‘corporate’ pages). Other data shows there’s a correlation between return rates and participation with content.

Correlation does not mean causation and it might very well be that visitors who spent more time on the website, visit content pages, etc. are more likely to return.

So, what makes visitors return to a website? And more importantly: what makes visitors come back to old content, rather than continuously having to add new content?

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A quest for relevance

Photo by Stephanie Schuldes on Flickr.

To succeed in our never-ending quest to make culture and the arts more relevant in the lives of people, all we have to do (online) is approach the right people at the right time and place with the right message through the right communication channel.

Simply put, don’t tweet about overflowing toilets unless you want to make a point about the pressing need for maintenance funds. And in that case, be sure to ask at the beginning of the month, when people just received their paychecks.

The museum of the 21^st century is as successful in being relevant to people, as Google and Facebook ads are. (Or, if you prefer, will be in the near future.) In fact, we can use the very tools Google and Facebook ads provide us to prove that the more relevant we make our content, the more likely they are to engage with it.

In the chart below I’ve plotted a number of Facebook ads we ran. The potential reach of the ad is on the horizontal axis, on the vertical each ads true reach (normalized to a similar number of impressions per ad). The CTR chart of the same data is very much alike.

Without a doubt, ads aimed at a specific target group, with a specific message, almost always outperform the more general ads.

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